Emergency! Accidental format of ext3

Mon Jan 24 19:46:42 UTC 2005

On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 01:43:15PM -0500, Madison Kelly wrote:
>   I just made a royal screw up and I need some serious help!
> 
>   I meant to run 'fsck.ext3 /dev/hda1' and instead ran 'mkfs.ext3 
> /dev/hda1'.
> 
>   Oh sh!t moment..
> 
>   I did this using Knoppix so the drive has not been touched yet. Is 
> there a way to recover the file system?

Given the only part of the filesystem written by mkfs is the most
important (the filesystem inode tables), I suspect it isn't recoverable.
The data should all still be there, so if it's really important someone
could search the data for the specific data using raw io, and extract
the blocks and piece the files together.  It just won't happen
automatically with a tool.

Lennart Sorensen
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