recommendations on how to recover a corrupted, LVM-based hard drive?

Wed Feb 12 20:42:07 UTC 2014

On Wed, 12 Feb 2014, murph wrote:

> Try the poorly-named "testdisk" to see if it can get any of the old
> partition information.  I've had good luck with recovering
> accidentally-partitioned disks.

  so here's the current output from that utility after it finished a
lengthy scan of the (corrupted) drive:

Disk /dev/sdb - 750 GB / 698 GiB - CHS 91201 255 63
     Partition               Start        End    Size in sectors
>  FAT16 >32M               0  32 33    12  93 17     196608 [boot]
   Linux                    0  32 33 45105  20 35  724611072
   Linux                   12  93 18   216 183 31    3282944 [rootfs]
 * Linux                48416 239 16 48612 191 27    3145728
 P Linux                70007  45 55 70008  50 58      16384
 P Linux                86771 149 35 86779 190  3     131072
 L Linux Swap           89115 185 31 91201  52 51   33503232

Structure: Ok.  Use Up/Down Arrow keys to select partition.
Use Left/Right Arrow keys to CHANGE partition characteristics:
*=Primary bootable  P=Primary  L=Logical  E=Extended  D=Deleted
Keys A: add partition, L: load backup, T: change type, P: list files,
     Enter: to continue
FAT16, blocksize=2048, 100 MB / 96 MiB

  now, the "boot" and "rootfs" entries would correspond to the 2G
bootable SD card image that was written over the beginning of the
disk, and i would *guess* that the sizable "Linux" partition is the
home partition/LV that is the object of recovery, but i have no idea
what to do next or whether "testdisk" has the capability of
recognizing logical volumes.

  oh, crap, i hit "Quit" to back out of a menu and this utility just
cleared all those results, so i have to do the scan again. grrrrr ...

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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