I recently did a fresh install of ubuntu on a system with an old ubuntu install. I have a separate hard-drive which used to have a single ext4 partition, but during the install I accidentally selected "use this partition as ext3", but did not check "format".
When I mounted the drive, I only saw the lost+found
directory (which was empty). I tried using testdisk
to recover, but it only shows the lost+found
, since it is a perfectly valid partition.
I ran strings
on the block device, and see tons of file names, which is why I believe the journal data is still there somewhere.
I saw this question, which seems like exactly my situation, but didn't have enough information to help me: File recovery after reformattig ext3/4 partition -- extract old journal/superblock?
My current situation is that the drive still has a single ext3 partition, and I haven't written anything to it. I've been reading about ext4magic
, but I'm in a bit over my head. It seems like it expects the drive to already be formatted to ext4, so should I "upgrade" it to ext4? I'm nervous about writing anything to it without fully understanding what I'm doing.
The drive contains a lot of media I'd really like to save, but nothing I can't live without. I'm really only interested in recovery if I get file names as well, it's not worth listening to thousands of songs to try to identify and name them, and everything on the drive was well organized. I also don't have enough empty space to image the entire drive (it was 2TB, probably ~0.75TB full), but if that is required, I could talk myself into buying another drive for the purpose.
Thanks in advance for reading, and even if you can point me towards some documentation I can read, that would be really helpful! I don't mind sinking a few (more) hours into trying to fix this if I learn something along the way!
~# fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders, total 3907029168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0007c87c
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 63 3907024064 1953512001 83 Linux
sudo mount -t ext4 ...
?lost+found
, butmount
shows it as ext4. Looks like something may have written over the journal and I may be SOL