Recovering a damaged ext3 system, where to start?

[Neil Woolford]

Thank you all for the useful replies!

You've made it clear that the situation is likely to not be so hopeless 
after all.  In
particular, the number of manual steps is fairly small when using the Live 
CD as
a recovery disc.  (I'll also see if Chuck's suggestion of mounting the 
filesystem may work
to provide access to do backups of the home directory before trying to 
straighten out
the system.)*

I've now tried booting from the live on my system and forcing a check on 
the (good) file
system.  So far so good, I can certainly talk him through that on the phone.

So I've put a disc set in the post to him by express mail :-)

One little thought;  I have some spare small hard drives around at the 
moment, and a spare
computer.  Is there any way of deliberately damaging an ext3 system so that 
I can have a
bit more practice before doing a live recovery?  (Could I even do it on a 
floppy for practice?)

Neil

* Yes, I know I should have got him into good backup habits, but I haven't 
yet fitted him a CD or
DVD writer, and floppies suck.  I'll be fitting a CD or DVD writer when I 
visit him next month.


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