On Thu, Apr 09, 2009 at 01:51:07PM -0400, Russell Polo wrote:
> lessons I learned :
>
>    * *BACKUP EVRYTHING EVEN CONFIG FILES*
>    * Unplug drives you don't want to install onto
>    * Backup the LVM configuration ( On another computer) /Before/ you
>      start screwing with it.
>    * Backing up the size of the partitions would have also been useful
>

Yes. :)

>   1. just scan the drive for strings I expect to find in my missing
>      perl scripts. and pull out the raw data. None are larger than one
>      cluster.

There are tools which do this...

http://freshmeat.net/projects/magicrescue

>   2. scan the drive for the old lvm header and try to calculate where
>      the old partition was, reset + see if I can mount.
>   3. both
>   4. neither. Just bite the bullet and rewrite.

Addendum:  If you have the space to do so, clone the drive and work with
the image (dd if=/dev/sdx of=/some/file).

You can do the magicrescue nondestructively, once you start editing
partition headers you risk massive changes to the disk as the fs tries
to repair itself.

> I figure I have a good chance of pulling this off because the home 
> partition also had several large disk images (~5 Gb each ) (for qemu) that 
> I don't care at all about. with any luck, the 2~3 Gb that was written to 
> the space where the disk images were. since the scripts were mostly newer, 
> I'm hoping they will be in the un-screwed part of the disk

Your best chances of success lie in the fact that the files you care
about are small; Where they lie is a better question... good luck!

> Any suggestions as to how I should proceed? It's not critical. The most 
> complex script, couldn't possibly take me more than a few hours to replace. 
> And the replacement will probably be better.

Sounds like you mostly have the right ideas about it already, I suspect
you won't be able to do anything sane w/ recovering the partition table
since the contents are scrambled (unless your data partition is 100%
beyond where it wrote the new data).  I'd exhaust all non-destructive
recovery methods first before you do anything that writes to the drive.

-m

-- 
Mike Kershaw/Dragorn <[email protected]>
GPG Fingerprint: 3546 89DF 3C9D ED80 3381  A661 D7B2 8822 738B BDB1

Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.

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