On Sun, Mar 03, 2002 at 09:22:14PM +0100, Paul Seelig wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Brian Potkin) writes: > > > The man page for Midnight Commander claims that undeletion is possible > > only with an ext2 file system. Your suggestion to explore whether it > > would deal with ext3 is reasonable but doesn't mc use debugfs which is > > designed for an ext2 file system? > > > Writing from the perspective of an up to date Debian/unstable system > only (i really can't be bothered with this rotten potato anymore): > > debugfs is part of the e2fsprogs package which in turn is ext3-aware.
I took what the man page for mc said at face value and didn't dig any further to look in detail at the e2fsprogs documentation. Thanks for the correction; it gives me some incentive to make an ext3 partition and test how debugfs deals with deleted files on it. > > I was aware that Midnight Commander has the facility you describe so I > > used it. It told me it was `loading deleted files information' and was > > still going strong after an hour. I went to bed, dreamt of inodes, got > > up and there it was still churning away. > > > Having become curious after writing my message, i tried this as well > on an ext3 filesystem with similar effect. But i was not patient > enough to stand the procedure for more than an hour... ;-) This behaviour appears to be a bug in mc and has been reported in bug report #121917. > > Now that partition only has > > about 50M of free space so I suspect there is insufficient room to write > > the undeleted files to it. > > > Even if you wanted to, you simply couldn't and you better wouldn't, > even if you could because you wouldn't want to use those unlinked > inodes to be overwritten by "restoring" your files. > > The last time i succesfully undeleted using MC (almost two years ago) > i tried this and the undeletion routine refused writing data onto the > same partition. A couple of hours after making this statement it struck me that writing to an unmounted partition is not likely to succeed. > > A way to direct the file listing somewhere > > else would be useful. > > > What should this be good for? Not much! Basically, I was having difficulty understanding mc's behaviour and not having used it for this purpose before I made the mistake of assuming it was copying the files and required room to write them out somewhere. Brian.