1 reply to this topic

[phr34kc0der]

Ok, I wasnt thinking and did a mkfs instead of a fsck (that'll teach me for not checking what my fingers do). Whats the best way to go about recovery? I dont have a similar sized HDD else i'd just try and copy what I could with the tools I've used before. Can a mkfs (ext3) be reversed?

edit:
well wiki says this:

There is no chance of file recovery after file system format.

so I guess there is no standard way to recover from this. I'm running photorec to see what it can get back.

Edited by phr34kc0der, 29 July 2010 - 06:39 PM.

[lattera]

I would do a forensic backup. Copy the disk byte-for-byte. All formatting does is set up the inode table structure. The actual data should be intact for the most part. Some of the data might be overwritten. But there's actually a good chance of getting bigger chunks of data back if you wanna spend time with a hex editor and data recovery tools.