Crashed ext3-filesystem

[Christian Kujau]

On Thu, 7 Jun 2007, Jürgen Landsmann wrote:
> Our home-directories are located on a separate HDD (30GB, 1 large primary 
> ext3 partition) and until yesterday it worked correctly.

...30 GB and no backups?

> Because the 
> partition was nearly full we had to enlarge our home-space by moving it to a 
> larger HDD.
> We decided to try a copy of whole partition by using gparted from the 
> "SystemRescueCd" (http://www.sysresccd.org).

Why would you do this? What's wrong with tar/cp?

> Because we thought that the reason of this crash was caused by an error in 
> the APM-funcionality we tried it once more by booting the kernel using the 
> "noapm" parameter. But even this try crashed ...

Any more details regarding the crashes? log messages, sysrq-t available?

> The directory containing the userfiles was completely gone an in "lost&found" 
> there are hundreds of items.

Ouch :(
Not much you can do here. I'd take a first look with "file /lost+found/*"
to see if there's something useful in there. ext2/3-recovery tools are 
out there, but I guess you'll have to try a few and see if they can 
recover anything:

  - e2undel, recover (both available as debian packages in unstable)
  - R-Linux, a free (as in beer) recovery tool for win32 (works pretty good though)
  - ...and then there's always grep(1) & friends :(

hth,
Christian.
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