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Need help desperately: deleted a virtual machine with critical data under linux.

S

Starriol

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 3, 2006
Messages
191
Hi all,

I'm in a pretty messed-up situation, hope you can give me a hand.
I deleted by accident a folder containing a VMware server virtual machine, that contains most critical information. The host OS is CentOS 5.5, which I believe by default uses Ext3.

I shut down the PC intermediately after noticing this.
Is there any chance of recovering the files? Would they be able to mount to the same or another virtual machine?

I need to get this information somehow, there are no backups.

Which software can I use?

If anyone can help me recover this, you'll get a free book by amazon, you have my word.
I'm THAT desperate.
 
Ext3 is effectively ext2 plus a (sort of optional) journal, so anything that works with ext2 should handle ext3 as well. Definitely worth a try.

Failing that, and depending on what kind of files you lost, you can scan the entire disk looking for JPEG headers/relevant text phrases/whatever; basically treating it as a multi-GB pile of random data to sift through. For jpgs, there are automated solutions (e.g. photorec), but for most other things you'll have to do it rather manually. (For text, cat /dev/disk/whatever | strings | less is about as fancy as you're likely to get - or you can use grep and ask for a liberal amount of context.)

I recommend booting from a USB stick or liveCD, mounting an external drive to save stuff to, and brewing about a gallon of tea.
 
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