Re: [Bug-ddrescue] oops, i recovered right over my good hard drive

[David Favro]

Michael Mullen wrote:
> I knew i could always reformat the 500 GB drive, but i am now running
> photorec (6 hours remaining, yea!)  and putting the results on a spare
> USB hard drive.  So is there a way, using something like mk2fs, to
> create/reset the partition to the full 500 GB but have the new
> partition keep whatever data was on there before?
Not that I know of, and it's kind of hard to imagine that it's possible,
given that 40GB of it have been stomped on.  Just reformat it to a fresh
500GB filesystem with "mke2fs -j /dev/the_partition" and recopy whatever
you were able to save from the USB drive back to the new partition. 
But, if you want to really get crazy with it, debugfs is probably where
you'll start.

That said, for next time, you could try using e2image on a periodic
basis to save just the metadata (before it gets corrupted), which
apparently can be used in conjunction with debugfs and other tools to do
something like what you describe, but I've no idea how.  Try reading up
on debugfs(8), dumpe2fs(8), e2image(8), e2fsck(8), and hang out on the
filesystem mailing-lists.  If you get far enough into it that you can
recover that kind of stuff, you might have a new career.

-- David
> thanks
> ~ Mike