Recovering lost+found

[Nifty Fedora Mitch]

On Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 10:57:58AM -0700, Geoffrey Leach wrote:
> 
> Major crash. 4000+ files in /lost+found.
> (/vmlinuz-2.6.29.6-217.2.16.fc11.i686.PAE)
> 
> The obvious strategy to re-install and re-update. Does anyone have a 
> better idea?

Depends on what is in the 4000 files.

You might be able to do a "yum reinstall *".
"rpm -qa" can remind you what you have installed.
That can put a lot of problems right.

In some cases a 'liveCD' can help in a bootstrap 
process that gets you to the point that yum works
and does not risk more data loss.
 
In olden times recovering lost+found was necessary to finish recovering 
as much data as possible.  It was common to move lost+found to a different
dir name and then a shell script mklost+found would do a mkdir followed by
touching then removing a large number of files so the 
system would have inodes in lost+found dir to reconnect lost
chunks of stuff to.   Then at some measured pace each file/ block
found in lost+found was inspected and assigned to a user
that can identify his data.

See the man page for  mklost+found 

-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	Found me a new hat, now what?