Possible to recover ext3?

[dreamnid]

Hi,

It's been a long weekend for us, so I apologize if I'm missing details.

We have an 1 TB iSCSI LUN at Softlayer that we used for hosting images. Back in November, we have managed the LUN with LVM and used ext3 for the file system.

For whatever reason, one of their hard drives failed. It has been repaired, but the Softlayer technician didn't know that our LUN was managed with LVM and tried to mount the LUN directly and perform an fsck/e2fsck. In which case, he stopped the process when the files were being sent to the lost+found folder. At this point, they have made a snapshot.

They have since tried the following steps:

2a. The snapshot was cloned and accessed from test server.
2b. PV metadata was recovered from the last "good" archive of the lvm from your server.
2c. After recovering the PV metadata I created an VG and LV using the recreated PV.
2d. I created a partition with parted that used the entire LV.
2e. dumpe2fs showed the following as the FS create data: Sun Nov 25 23:21:23 2007
2f. The file system would not mount due to errors.
2g. An fsck was run against the filesystem. If I recall correctly, it used a backup superblock.

Unfortunately, the files were recovered into the lost+found folder, meaninig we lost the directory structure and file names.

I was wondering if there is some utility like Ontrack that can recover this missing information, if anything seems wrong from SL doing, or if there is another issue we can look into.

If you want any other info, let me know.

Thanks!

 

[nephilim]

R-Studio can scan ext3 as I recall, but it's fairly likely that in the process of recovering your man has overwritten the directory structure. If you're lucky you can recover most of everything else.