SOS : All my data is gone!

Jean-Sébastien Guay <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.gentoo.alpha
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi everyone,

Everyone's worst nightmare just happened to me. For no reason (that I 
can see), all my data is gone from my Gentoo Alpha machine. I'll start 
from the beginning...

The machine was running for about 4 days since last reboot. Everything 
seemed fine. I had logged in through SSH from another machine and was 
trying to do an emerge --sync, and it gave me lots of messages saying 
that /var/cache/edb/... was read-only. For some reason, the / filesystem 
was mounted read-only (it wasn't the last time I was working on it... 
after the last reboot). So I tried to remount / read-write, but it said 
it couldn't. So I figured  had to reboot the system so it would remount 
it read-write.

After the reboot, it came up with an error saying it couldn't mount the 
root fs, and that I had to fix things manually. I entered the root 
password, and ran fsck, answering yes to every prompt (as I always do, I 
don't know enough about the filesystem to say "No! Don't fix inode 
39047850 because that'll break everything!"... ) When I was done, the 
system rebooted alone, and when MILO tried to start the kernel again, it 
wasn't there anymore. The whole root partition seems to be totally empty 
now.

My /tmp and /var/tmp partitions are still there though... *grins 
sheepishly* Why isn't it ever those partitions that get wiped out? :-(

I had lots of data that I would rather not have lost on that partition 
(though I can rebuild the system, nothing was absolutely essential, but 
it would take a long time to get it back to how it was).

So my question is, let's say I boot with a Gentoo LiveCD, is there 
anything I can do to try and recover some data from that partition? Or 
is everything gone forever? (I REALLY hope the former is true, and not 
the latter...)

Help me Gentoo-Alpha List, you're my only hope...

Thanks in advance,

J-S

-- 
___________________________________________
Jean-Sébastien Guay   [email protected]
             http://whitestar02.webhop.org/



-- 
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.9.13 - Release Date: 2005/04/16

-- 
[email protected] mailing list
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.