Help - disaster recovery

[David Fletcher]

On Sun, 2013-01-13 at 16:11 +1000, Phil wrote:
> Thank you for reading this,
> 
> I have done an incredibly stupid thing after a fresh installation of 
> Kububtu. Instead of copying my backup files I moved them to the new OS 
> and due to a second blunder I deleted a KDE file from the new 
> installation and now I cannot log in and I no longer have a backup. We 
> suffered a power interruption before I had a chance to make a new backup 
> plus the temperature has been up 45 degrees C for the past two weeks 
> which has been very tiring. Losing 13 years of work, e-mails passwords 
> etc is very destressing to say the least.
> 
> After spending most of the day searching Google for an answer I'm no 
> further advanced and this is where things stand at the moment.
> 
> I used photorec in an attempt to cover my backup files from my USB 
> backup drive. This resulted in two further problems:
> 
> 1. My internal hard drive (on a second older laptop) is nowhere near 
> large enough to hold the recovered files. That system also failed to 
> reboot because my home directory was full - I managed to solved that 
> problem.
> 
> 2. The recovered files have nonsense names such as f1234.txt, which can 
> be almost any type of file and there is likely to be thousands of them.
> 
> Using the KDE Partition Manager from the live dvd I found that the file 
> system is corrupted.
> 
> /dev/sda3 ext4 mount point "/media/and a long string of digits" is 
> readable and seems to be the / directory.
> 
> /dev/sda4 extended no mount point - this could include the /home 
> directory and possibly /usr/local.
> 
> Also included under /dev/sda4 is a large unallocated block and 
> /dev/sda...(can't determine the digit) a FAT32 block which is a second 
> partition for Vista which is also readable.
> 
> Vista seems to be intact but I cannot log in because grub is corrupted.
> 
> There should have been three ext4 partitions plus a swap.
> 
> Naturally I'm very keen to recover my home directory and any help will 
> be greatly appreciated. It seems to me that the best option is to 
> recreate the corrupter partitions on the laptop with the Kubuntu 
> installation.
> 
> Looking forward to receiving some good news.
> 
> --
> Regards,
> Phil
> 
> 

For about four quid including postage, a couple of days ago I got a
"just in case" adaptor from ebay that plugs a bare SATA laptop drive
into a USB socket.

That's the approach I would adopt - if something gets screwed on a drive
that contains vital information then DON'T keep fooling around with it.
Get it out, and plug it into another system as an external drive,
preferably as read-only. That way you might be able to recover your
data.

Dave