lost+found

[Adam Myrow]

I hope you had a backup!  The only thing you can do is use the "file"
command and "strings" commands to identify binary files and use a pager
like "less" to view them.  That is, if it didn't get hosed as well.  Your
best bet to recover the files is to boot off some sort of rescue disk if
you can't boot your main Linux system.  Another thing to watch out for
from my own experiences with trashed filesystems, is that some weird
permissions can get set when files get put in lost+found.  These include
the rather rarely used Linux-specific permissions that can make a file
undeletable, but still writable.  See the man pages for chattr and lsattr
to find out what these weird permissions are.  Also, modification dates
can be rather strange.  Out of curiosity, do you know what caused the
filesystem to get mangled?  I've only had it happen with EXT3 one time and
that was when I was running parted to resize a partition from the
Slackware Live CD and ran out of memory.  Parted terminated midway through
resizing, and I ended up having to restore two partitions, one of which
was my Slackware root partition.

For backups, I suggest getting hold of dump from
http://dump.sourceforge.net.  It works just like ufsdump on Solaris
systems, and dump on some other Unix systems.  It makes backups and
restorations fairly painless.  It is especially handy for restoring
individual files as you can interactively navigate the backup and add what
needs to be restored to a list to extract.  It was originally designed for
tape drives, but works just as well with hard drives, zip drives, and
pretty much anything that can store files.