Restore /home directory lost

vega64

I'm running Open, and didn't have a current backup. While running update to Current, I made a mistake. Had to reinstall OS. I forgot that /home would be overwritten and lost some files. I reformatted and reinstalled OS.

I'm sure I used the default partition offsets during system install so /home is the same where it is now.

I found Ports has a util called Testdisk and Photorec. It also runs on other OSes. I removed the drive from the system and tried running Testdisk on it hoping it would pick up /home and restore some files. Can't seem to have any luck with it.

Drive is formatted FFS2, I think there tool to do this for FFS.

Any ideas how I can restore the /home partiton? Mostly after some .dotfiles and application files which are in /home. Its nothing super important and if its lost, its lost.

rvp

vega64 I'm sure I used the default partition offsets during system install so /home is the same where it is now.

You can run strings(1) on the raw partition, then. If you know that all the files are all, say, >100 bytes in length, then:

strings -n 100 /dev/rsd0e            # whatever your /home dir. was.

The longer the length (-n N), the lesser the chance of false positives.

You can also try fgrep -bo STRING /dev/rXXX to get offsets of fixed strings (like #!/bin/sh), then use dd to retrieve those and adjacent blocks.

(All this assumes that the files are small--a few FS blocks at most--and so its blocks aren't scattered all over the disk.)

vega64

Just want to say thanks for replying. I'll play around with this idea. Forgot about "raw" blocks.

This seems to be direction I was trying to find with built-in utils. If I loose some or all the data, its ok. Fgrep is good touch and great idea since the small amount I do want to recover will probably be found using fgrep.