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FreeBSD Installation and Upgrading Installing and upgrading FreeBSD.

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Old 26th August 2008
zorcon zorcon is offline
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Default Possible to "unpartition" ?

While installing freebsd onto my server (over an ubuntu install) I neglectied to unplug my Drobo. You know where this is going. having done the freebsd install a number of times, i zoomed though the labeling and paritioning and formating and only after rebooting did i realize that freebsd didn't detect my primary drive, and I had instead formated my ext3 formated drobo. Is there anyway to "rescue" the data that was on the drobo? most of it was legal mp3s and avi's which i don't care about, but it was also my Photo repository. I'd love to be able to rescue the couple of months worth of photos since my last DVD backup burn.

specifics: drive is about a terabyte, usb /dev/sdb
I'm booted back in ubuntu server 8.04.01
the freebsd I was installing was 7.0-Release

svr:~# parted /dev/sdb
GNU Parted 1.7.1
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print

Disk /dev/sdb: 2199GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 2199GB 2199GB primary boot

(parted)
svr:~#


TIA
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Old 26th August 2008
Speedy Speedy is offline
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If you did not write anything to this drive yet then recovery chances are pretty good. Some of your files will be broken after restoring.
The tools to use are testdisk and photorec. I'm sure they are available from Ubuntu repos.
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Old 26th August 2008
zorcon zorcon is offline
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I've never heard of those apps. Thanks for the tip. I just installed them, and I'm reading though their docs now.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Thanks a lot! This might actually work! I'll post back on my progress.
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Old 26th August 2008
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
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Restoring the partition table is unlikely, overwritten data cannot be recovered.. this is a fact that seems to be disputed often, but it would be cost prohibitive and prone to failure. (It can't be done by specialized software, it would require a hardware solution..)

Now, if you only destroyed the partition table.. the file system would remain and you could recreate it with the same geometry, but if you created a file system.. several super block copies were made throughout the disk.. potentially fragmenting any existing data on the drive.

If you installed anything on the drive, over the existing data... your hope of recovery is slim to none.

Still, software like mentioned above might be able to recover any data that wasn't overwritten.. I hope you recover everything that was important to you, and I'm sure you'll be more cautious in the future. (Like more regular Backups.. paying attention to dmesg output)

I wish you the best of luck...
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Old 26th August 2008
Speedy Speedy is offline
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Actually, if there was a single partition created using defaults - repeating the same partition creation procedure will "restore" it without even needing TestDisk. The first superblock of EXT3 filesystem is certainly overwritten, but there are many of them throughout the disk. Some of them are usable, no doubt. So the second step would be running fsck to repair the filesystem.
But. If the lost files are really valuable to you, take an image of it (dd utility) before commiting any changes.
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Old 26th August 2008
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Speedy View Post
Actually, if there was a single partition created using defaults - repeating the same partition creation procedure will "restore" it without even needing TestDisk.
That is what I implied.
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