Possible to Recover LiveUSB Overlay Image?

[Raymond C. Rodgers]

Richard Shaw wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 9:34 AM, Raymond C. Rodgers 
> <sinful622 at gmail.com <mailto:sinful622 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Last night I ran into a bit of bad luck. The Fedora 9 LiveUSB
>     stick that I've been using on my notebook for several months
>     stopped responding so I did a hard reset of the notebook thinking
>     that it'll just reboot and everything would be fine.
>
>     As usual, I was wrong. On boot, I now drop into a recovery shell
>     with a "good luck" message. Apparently, I'm not the first one to
>     discover this (see
>     https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/ticket/28 ). While I'm
>     not so anxious to fix the installation, I would like to try to
>     recover my files from the overlay image, but  I'm not sure how to
>     go about this. It's not critical that I recover these files, but
>     it would be nice.
>
>     I was hoping that I could just mount the image like most other
>     disk images, but that didn't seem to work. Does anyone have any
>     suggestions on where I can find information about recovering the
>     files, or have direct answers for me? Is it even possible with
>     standard tools?
>
>     Thank you,
>     Raymond
>
>
> Sorry, you're more than likely out of luck. The overlay is not 
> "mountable" as it doesn't record whole file changes but rather block 
> level changes. One thing I did was as I got things working well, 
> updates I cared about, installed programs that didn't come with the 
> live image, I copied the overlay to the hard drive so when things went 
> south, I could at least get back to a "restore point".
>
> Richard
Thanks Richard, that's what I needed to know. Fortunately, there wasn't 
any significant data in the overlay; the most important thing there were 
some  notes I had made about configuring Apache with subversion and 
getting mod_pgsql (I think that's what it's called) up and running as 
well. Useful information but not critical.

Thanks for your response!
Raymond