[clug] LBT screwed up my drive

[Darren Freeman]

Dear list,

I am new to the list so if it's a known issue don't bite ;)

But about a month ago I was using the latest Linuxcare Bootable Toolbox
(forget the version number but it was a recent download).

I had booted using LBT, and was copying from one filesystem to another,
both were FAT32 and the physical partitions were hda2 => hdc2.

After part of the copy I aborted as I had a better idea. But after
deleting the copied files on hdc2 I found that files were still there.
It later became clear to me that I had corrupted both partitions. Since
hdc2 started empty I can say confidently that writes destined for hdc2
had been sent to hda2, thus trashing the filesystem. Maybe what I saw on
hdc2 was actually cached directory structure, maybe nothing was written
at all.

Immediately afterwards I found that the files on hda2 were still
visible, so I booted Win2K to attempt a scandisc (I wasn't going to
commit changes yet though). But on boot Win2K automagically repaired it
(no prompts or warnings) and I was left with *nothing* but those useless
filexxxx.chk files. I should have dd'd the partition before booting
Win2K but as I wasn't planning on writing to it I didn't.

Retrospectively I had seen this before but a while ago, and as nothing
bad happened (the partitions were backed up elsewhere) I must have
forgotten to throw away that LBT disc.

So anyway, as I hear that Linuxcare was once a project of CLUG, I
thought I should mention it. At the minimum, don't consider your LBT
disc to be safe. Normally you wouldn't backup a drive in order to copy
it, but this one time I lost everything. 24G gone and only 2G of it
backed up. Even worse, I was moving to an 80 G drive as I had filled my
40 G. Now I can't even half fill the 80 =).

I do still have an image of the partition after Win2K murdered it. If
anyone has any ideas for recovery, I'd *love* to hear them! For example,
I hear that FAT32 has two copies of the FAT. If I didn't toast the
second one, maybe I can recover it? Some of the useless files left
behind can be used, for example grepping for AVI and then playing
reveals some video clips with some of them corrupt.

Have fun,
Darren