Undelete or Unformat reiserfs partition

[Valent]

I wanted a second GNU/Linux to test out beside my primary one so I popped installation disk and started the installation.

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if you don't have time to read it all just go to the end paragraph.
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The disk situation was this:
/dev/hda1 - primary GNU/Linux
/dev/hda2 - swap
/dev/hda3 - home
/dev/hda5 - 6.3 GB "future linux" partition
/dev/hda6 - 26 GB data partition (reiserfs)

I first tried resizing hda5 to 4GB (which is enough for most distros) because I wanted a small partition left for Knoppix or some other smaller distro as well.

Resize didn't work, so I just deleted hda5 (hda6 become hda5) and then added two partitions in it's place. Strange thing was that I got hda5 and hda7! The old hda6 insisted that it kept it's hda6 label! I thought that this big partition would be hda7 because it is the last partition on disk.

When I hit complete I got some errors. These deleting and creating partitions mush have confused the partitioning program. And when I booted my working GNU/Linux I saw that my data partition is empty! Not only that but I got some strange small partitions. Before real hda5 there is one small partition (maybe only a few MB) and also one after hda6!
I deleted them from there and created two partition again. But not I got an formated 26GB partition where my stuff was!

How do I undelete, or unformat this reiserfs partition to get my data back. What is the procedure? What tools do I need?

Thank you.

[foolish]

Hmm, sounds like you're data's lost to me. You can try to do some raw data recovery. I don't know how.

[Valent]

Originally Posted by foolish

Hmm, sounds like you're data's lost to me. You can try to do some raw data recovery. I don't know how.

I'm going to criticize you! How can you say that it you don't know anything about it?

Her is the procedure on how I got data back:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reis...3491425826&w=2

Hello,

while reinstalling a Debian on a new hard drive, I made the mistake to
format in reiserfs my good old /home which was on /dev/sda7 instead of
formatting the new /dev/hda7. Gasp ! Eight gigabytes lost ...

Or ... maybe it was not totally lost :-) I immediately made a dump of
the partition with 'dd' and started grepping some known text on it. It
seemed that no data was really lost. I didn't know what to do. So I read
the man pages and found the reiserfsck command quite interesting :-)

Ok, I am a total newbie to filesystems and to ReiserFS. So maybe it will
sound trivial to you, but just in case it happens to anyone else, I just
wanted to say that running a reiserfsck --rebuild-tree -S on my
partition was enough to unformat it. I ended up with some file in
lost+found, but a 'file *' is enough to discover what they are.

So, maybe it would be usefull to add an entry in the "Example of using"
section of the man page of reiserfsck, saying something like : "If you
reformatted by mistake a reiserFS partition, you can try to unformat it
by running reiserfsck --rebuild-tree -S on it".

Anyway, thank you for developing this filesystem.
Nicolas Vanderavero.

[v0m17]

I have never seen any examples in a MAN page ,I never understood why not ,since new commands are difficult to use from a man page,but most people understand it better when given an example.