request for advice on recovering filesystem

[andy baxter]

On 13/09/10 15:17, mp wrote:
> Due to what I think is a failing USB system (too little voltage perhaps)
> an external USB hard drive appeared to be unmounted and remounted about
> 5 times in a very short period of time - maybe less than 10 seconds -
> while music was playing from it, resulting in the file system getting
> mangled up.
>
> The disk then could not be mounted due to a bad superblock or inode.
>
> Stupidly I did not take this very serious and ran ext3.fsck with yes to
> repair as default and it completed successfully and I thought all was
> well, so didn't even keep the log/details.
>    

I'm going to be helping mp with the data recovery (I know him IRL) and 
just want to ask some supplementary questions.

- does anyone know what fsck.ext3 is likely to have done to try and fix 
the disk when run as above, and how this is likely to affect the 
repairability? I'm hoping that large portions of the original directory 
tree may still be intact on the disk but no longer linked to the root 
directory, and thus recoverable using something like debugfs.
- to mp - is most of your collection in mp3, ogg or a mixture? I know 
that many file formats have a characteristic header which we might be 
able to search for and recover the listenable file at least albeit 
without the proper file name.

andy