Thanks so much for your help, Ray.
I have tried the instructions at: http://recover.sourceforge.net/unix/ (one of the first things I did try) ...and I got a whole lot of garbage spit back to my screen; so much so, I had to quit.
I am attempting to do something along these lines:
grep -a -B10000 -A0 "wowerpresumes" /dev/hdfb
...and since I'm not sure what to put for B and A, I may be doing something wrong here. I don't recall how large the directory was 'before' things were deleted.
You do not need to know how large the directory was. This approach, as I read it (I've never actually used it myself), is limited to recovering text files. The trick is that you need to know something about the contents of some line of the file you want to recover. Then, you use grep to examine the raw partition (in this case, /dev/hdfb) as a single file (the -a switch tells grep to pretend the file is text), and it will turn up each instance of what you entered, reporting back the preceding "B" lines of text, the line itself, and "A" lines of following text.
Since you selected a very large value for B and 0 for A, you get a mess to the screen when you try this.
There is no general way to specify "right" values for A and B. You simply have to know something about the structure of the file. And since this approach will (I think) examine the filesystem linearly, a fragmented file will not be recoverable this way. Nor will a directory, which is really just a list of inode entries, which themselves can be scattered anywhere convenient on the filesystem. (And what I read about ext3 says the inode tables will be zero'd on deletion anyway.)
I did a bit more searching and still cannot find any undelete program tailored to ext3. I did find this one for ext2 -- http://www.data-recovery-software.net/Linux_Recovery.shtml -- that MIGHT be worth a look, since its description seems to indicate that it does not depend on the inode table to recover. And this one -- http://www.securiteam.com/tools/6R00T0K06S.html -- is not specific about what filesystems it will work on. The Debian package tct (Coroner's Toolkit) also includes a program called unrm, but I don't know if it is the same one.
Finally, my search turned up a couple of references to www.experts-exchange.com, a site that requires registration. You might want to check its resources.
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