amazingly, I've recovered most of my disk. from findsuper, at the beginning, thisoff block fs_blk_sz blksz last_mount 33280 32 64480 0 Wed Sep 2 10:38:04 1998
choose to start a cylinder 1, +64480k, and it recovers the /boot partition And immediately after this in the list, I find another of a likely start 58753536 57376 64480 0 Sun Aug 30 12:46:24 1998 66061312 64513 258048 0 Thu Jun 25 11:08:35 1998 So I toldit to make hda2 258048k, and I recovered an irrelevant partition. After a little diddling, I figured to grep the list for Sep.*98, to find blocks modified in the last couple of days. This leads to -544980480 -532207 1048577 0 Wed Sep 2 10:38:04 1998 This is out of the first batch of negative numbers. Since it was written to this morning, I assume that it is part of a real file system. Since this is the first superblock in the list with this fs_blk_size, I figure that it must be the first superblock for its partition. So I should be able to to calculate the actual starting block as 2^22-532207 = 4194304-532207=3662097, shouldn't I? And since fdisk says that my cylinders are 1008*512 bytes, they're 504 blocks each. So dividing my block count by 504, i get 7266.0654, or that my partition starts in cylinder 7267. So I start the extended partition in that cylinder, to the end of the disk. And then I add a partition of 1048577k, and successfully recover /usr/src. After the 1048577 entries end, i find 520061440 507872 2097112 0 Thu Jun 25 01:42:31 1998 520372736 508176 1048577 0 Sun Aug 30 12:46:24 1998 528065536 515689 2096451 0 Mon Jun 22 18:13:57 1998 528450048 516064 2097112 0 Thu Jun 25 01:42:31 1998 529015296 516616 2097112 0 Wed Sep 2 10:38:06 1998 It's getting tricky now, the 2097112 clusters start before the end of my partition. But there's a modification this morning . . . Looking closely, these aren't from the same file system; they're too close together: they should be 8192 blocks apart, and it's only 548. So there are two fs around of the same size. So I assume it's the one modified today, and add the next partition with size 2097112. This successfully recovered /home, which has the handful of files I actually care about in all this. (well, it would be nice to recover /etc, and /var/lib/games/nethack/scores :) But now I'm not sure what comes next: there are two 100mb (or are they 128mb?) swap partitions, which i don't think leave superblocks, and there's about 1G of /. but grepping for Sep.*98 finds one more, -1356299776 -1324511 1140016 0 Wed Sep 2 15:41:32 1998 Since the integers have rolled over yet again, this should mean starting at block 2*2^22-1324511=7064097, and dividing by 504 yields 14017 as the starting cylinder. But no dice. This doesn't yield a valid file system this time. I also tried adding a pair of 100m partitions, then using the rest, but still no dice? Any more ideas, or should i reinstall a minimal system on /boot, ftp /home off the system while the getting's good, and do a clean reinstall? rick Since it is in the first batch of negative block numbers,