[Preston] can you recommend some local help?

[Richard Boardman]

Hi Kevin,

> So since I found you, maybe someone could recommend to me a good local
> individual/company who can help me with some disaster recovery at very short
> notice. Like today :)

It's been a while since I've lived around Preston way (but I remain 
nostalgic lurking on the list!) so I can't help there. However, depending 
on how valuable the data is (and how much one is willing to spend getting 
it sorted out) you could contact OnTrack [http://www.ontrack.co.uk/] who 
might be able to bail you out if all else fails.
 
> I have a trashed filesystem on a live website (Debian Linux), ie very
> urgent. I'm checking the filesystem with e2fsck but to be honest I'm going
> to be slightly out of my depth when I come to run the repair... so any
> recommendations would be appreciated :)

Before you go any further, I would suggest imaging the drive with 
something like:

  dd if=/dev/hda of=broken_disk_image conv=noerror,sync

(assuming /dev/hda is the disk containing the suspect ext2 partition), 
then at least you have a copy of it should anything else go wrong. I have 
no experience of recovering borked ext2 partitions, only reiser, so I 
can't really help you beyond this, though Google seems to yield some handy 
links. dd'ing the partition itself (e.g. /dev/hda2) might be sensible too, 
then you could try to mount the image with mount -t ext2 -o loop 
broken_partition_image /mnt/fix. At least then you wouldn't be disturbing 
the 'master copy' with any tools you might try.

http://homepage.smc.edu/morgan_david/cs40/analyze-ext2.htm
http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/recovering-ext2.html
http://www.guzu.net/linux/e2retrieve.php
http://e2salvage.sourceforge.net/

(Links courtesy of Google)

Good luck!

Cheers,
Rich


Dr Richard Boardman                             o o o o o
Computational Engineering and Design Group      o o o o o
School of Engineering Sciences                  o o o o o
University of Southampton                       o o o o o
United Kingdom                                  o o o o o