[email protected]rm * ~. And too late, you notice
the extra space in that command. You've just deleted your magnum opus!
But help is at hand. This document presents a discussion of how to retrieve
deleted files from a Second Extended File System. Just maybe, you'll be able
to release that program after all...
This mini-Howto attempts to provide hints on how to retrieve deleted files from an ext2 file system. It also contains a limited amount of discussion of how to avoid deleting files in the first place.
I intend it to be useful certainly for people who have just had, shall we say,
a little accident with rm; however, I also hope that people read it
anyway. You never know: one day, some of the information in here could save
your bacon.
The text assumes a little background knowledge about UNIX file systems in general; however, I hope that it will be accessible to most Linux users. If you are an outright beginner, I'm afraid that undeleting files under Linux does require a certain amount of technical knowledge and persistence, at least for the time being.
You will be unable to recover deleted files from an ext2 file system without
at least read access to the raw device on which the file was stored. In
general, this means that you must be root, but some distributions (such as
Debian GNU/Linux) provide a
disk group whose members have access to such devices. You also need
debugfs from the e2fsprogs package. This should have been
installed by your distribution.
Why have I written this? It stems largely from my own experiences with a
particularly foolish and disastrous rm -r command as root. I deleted
about 97 JPEG files which I needed and could almost certainly not recover from
other sources. Using some helpful tips (see section
Credits and Bibliography) and a great deal of
persistence, I recovered 91 files undamaged. I managed to retrieve at least
parts of five of the rest (enough to see what the picture was in each case).
Only one was undisplayable, and even for this one, I am fairly sure that no
more than 1024 bytes were lost (though unfortunately from the beginning of the
file; given that I know nothing about the JFIF file format I had done as much
as I could).
I shall discuss further below what sort of recovery rate you can expect for deleted files.
The various publicly-released revisions of this document (and their publication dates) are as follows:
What changes have been made in this version? First of all, the thinko in the example of file recovery has been fixed. Thankyou to all those who wrote to point out my mistaek; I hope I've learned to be more careful when making up program interaction.
Secondly, the discussion of UNIX file system layout has been rewritten to be, I hope, more understandable. I wasn't entirely happy with it in the first place, and some people's comments indicated that it wasn't clear.
Thirdly, the vast uuencoded gzipped tarball of fsgrab in the middle of the
file has been removed. The program is now available on
my website
and on
Metalab
(and mirrors).
Fourthly, the document has been translated into the Linux Documentation Project SGML Tools content markup language. This markup language can be easily converted to any of a number of other markup languages (including HTML and LaTeX) for convenient display and printing. One benefit of this is that beautiful typography in paper editions is a much more achievable goal; another is that the document has cross-references and hyperlinks when viewed on the Web.
This revision is very much an incremental change. It's here mainly to include changes suggested by readers, one of which is particularly important.
The first change was suggested by Egil Kvaleberg
[email protected],
who pointed out the dump command in debugfs. Thanks again, Egil.
The second change is to mention the use of chattr for avoiding deleting
important files. Thanks to Herman Suijs
[email protected]
for mentioning this one.
The abstract has been revised. URLs have been added for organisations and software. Various other minor changes have been made (including fixing typos and so on).
Though it is the first release in 17 months, there is very little that is
new here. This release merely fixes a few minor errors (typos, dangling
URLs, that sort of thing -- especially the non-link to the Open Group), and
updates a few parts of the text that have become hopelessly out-of-date,
such as the material on kernel versions and on lde. Oh, and I've
changed `Sunsite' to `Metalab' throughout.
This release is anticipated to be the last one before release 2.0, which will hopefully be a full Howto. I have been working on some substantial changes which will justify an increment of the major version number.
The latest public release of this document should always be available in on the Linux Documentation Project site (and mirrors).
The latest release is also kept on my website in several formats:
It is vital to remember that Linux is unlike MS-DOS when it comes to undeletion. For MS-DOS (and its bastard progeny Windows 95), it is generally fairly straightforward to undelete a file - the `operating system' (I use the term loosely) even comes with a utility which automates much of the process. For Linux, this is not the case.
So. Rule number one (the prime directive, if you will) is:
KEEP BACKUPS
no matter what. Think of all your data. Perhaps, like me, you keep several years' of accumulated email, contacts, programs, papers on your computer. Think of how your life would be turned upside down if you had a catastrophic disk failure, or if -- heaven forbid! -- a malicious cracker wiped your disks. This is not unlikely; I have corresponded with a number of people in just such a situation. I exhort all right-thinking Linux users to go out and buy a useful backup device, work out a decent backup schedule, and to stick to it. Myself, I use a spare hard disk on a second machine, and periodically mirror my home directory onto it over the ethernet. For more information on planning a backup schedule, read Frisch (1995) (see section Bibliography and Credits).
In the absence of backups, what then? (Or even in the presence of backups: belt and braces is no bad policy where important data is concerned.)
Try to set the permissions for important files to 440 (or less): denying
yourself write access to them means that rm requires an explicit
confirmation before deleting. (I find, however, that if I'm recursively
deleting a directory with rm -r, I'll interrupt the program on the first
or second confirmation request and reissue the command as rm -rf.)
A good trick for selected files is to create a hard link to them in a hidden
directory. I heard a story once about a sysadmin who repeatedly deleted
/etc/passwd by accident (thereby half-destroying the system). One of
the fixes for this was to do something like the following (as root):
# mkdir /.backup
# ln /etc/passwd /.backup
It requires quite some effort to delete the file contents completely: if you say
# rm /etc/passwd
then
# ln /.backup/passwd /etc
will retrieve it. Of course, this does not help in the event that you overwrite the file, so keep backups anyway.
On an ext2 file system, it is possible to use ext2 attributes to protect things.
These attributes are manipulated with the chattr command. There is an
`append-only' attribute: a file with this attribute may be appended to, but may
not be deleted, and the existing contents of the file may not be overwritten.
If a directory has this attribute, any files or directories within it may be
modified as normal, but no files may be deleted. The `append-only' attribute
is set with
$ chattr +a FILE...
There is also an `immutable' attribute, which can only be set or cleared by root. A file or directory with this attribute may not be modified, deleted, renamed, or (hard) linked. It may be set as follows:
# chattr +i FILE...
The ext2fs also provides the `undeletable' attribute (+u in chattr).
The intention is that if a file with that attribute is deleted, instead of
actually being reused, it is merely moved to a `safe location' for deletion at
a later date. Unfortunately this feature has not yet been implemented in
mainstream kernels; and though in the past there has been some interest in
implementing it, it is not (to my knowledge) available for any current kernels.
Some people advocate making rm a shell alias or function for rm -i
(which asks for confirmation on every file you delete). Indeed, the
Red Hat distribution does this by
default for all users, including root. Personally, I cannot stand software
which won't run unattended, so I don't do that. There is also the problem
that sooner or later, you'll be running in single-user mode, or using a
different shell, or even a different machine, where your rm function
doesn't exist. If you expect to be asked for confirmation, it is easy to
forget where you are and to specify too many files for deletion. Likewise,
the various scripts and programs that replace rm are, IMHO, very
dangerous.
A slightly better solution is to start using a package which handles
`recyclable' deletion by providing a command not named rm. For details
on these, see Peek, et al (1993) (see section
Bibliography and Credits). These however
still suffer from the problem that they tend to encourage the user to have a
nonchalant attitude to deletion, rather than the cautious approach that is
often required on Unix systems.
That depends. Among the problems with recovering files on a high-quality, multi-tasking, multi-user operating system like Linux is that you never know when someone wants to write to the disk. So when the operating system is told to delete a file, it assumes that the blocks used by that file are fair game when it wants to allocate space for a new file. (This is a specific example of a general principle for Unix-like systems: the kernel and the associated tools assume that the users aren't idiots.) In general, the more usage your machine gets, the less likely you are to be able to recover files successfully.
Also, disk fragmentation can affect the ease of recovering files. If the partition containing the deleted files is very fragmented, you are unlikely to be able to read a whole file.
If your machine, like mine, is effectively a single-user workstation, and you weren't doing anything disk-intensive at the fatal moment of deleting those files, I would expect a recovery rate in the same ball-park as detailed above. I retrieved nearly 94% of the files (and these were binary files, please note) undamaged. If you get 80% or better, you can feel pretty pleased with yourself, I should think.
The procedure principally involves finding the data on the raw partition device and making it visible again to the operating system. There are basically two ways of doing this: one is to modify the existing file system such that the deleted inodes have their `deleted' flag removed, and hope that the data just magically falls back into place. The other method, which is safer but slower, is to work out where the data lies in the partition and write it out into a new file on another file system.
There are some steps you need to take before beginning to attempt your data recovery; see sections Unmounting the file system, Preparing to change inodes directly and Preparing to write data elsewhere for details. To find out how to actually retrieve your files, see sections Finding the deleted inodes, Obtaining the details of the inodes, Recovering data blocks and Modifying inodes directly.
Regardless of which method you choose, the first step is to unmount the file system containing the deleted files. I strongly discourage any urges you may have to mess around on a mounted file system. This step should be performed as soon as possible after you realise that the files have been deleted; the sooner you can unmount, the smaller the chance that your data will be overwritten.
The simplest method is as follows: assuming the deleted files were in the
/usr file system, say:
# umount /usr
You may, however, want to keep some things in /usr available. So
remount it read-only:
# mount -o ro,remount /usr
If the deleted files were on the root partition, you'll need to add a -n
option to prevent mount from trying to write to /etc/mtab:
# mount -n -o ro,remount /
Regardless of all this, it is possible that there will be another process using
that file system (which will cause the unmount to fail with an error such as
`Resource busy'). There is a program which will send a signal to any process
using a given file or mount point: fuser. Try this for the /usr
partition:
# fuser -v -m /usr
This lists the processes involved. Assuming none of them are vital, you can say
# fuser -k -v -m /usr
to send each process a SIGKILL (which is guaranteed to kill it), or for
example,
# fuser -k -TERM -v -m /usr
to give each one a SIGTERM (which will normally make the process exit
cleanly).
My advice? Don't do it this way. I really don't think it's wise to play with a file system at a low enough level for this to work. This method also has problems in that you can only reliably recover the first 12 blocks of each file. So if you have any long files to recover, you'll normally have to use the other method anyway. (Although see section Will this get easier in future? for additional information.)
If you feel you must do it this way, my advice is to copy the raw partition data to an image on a different partition, and then mount this using loopback:
# cp /dev/hda5 /root/working
# mount -t ext2 -o loop /root/working /mnt
(Note that obsolete versions of mount may have problems with this. If
your mount doesn't work, I strongly suggest you get the latest version,
or at least version 2.7, as some very old versions have severe security
bugs.)
Using loopback means that if and when you completely destroy the file system, all you have to do is copy the raw partition back and start over.
If you chose to go this route, you need to make sure you have a rescue
partition somewhere -- a place to write out new copies of the files you
recover. Hopefully, your system has several partitions on it: perhaps a
root, a /usr, and a /home. With all these to choose from,
you should have no problem: just create a new directory on one of these.
If you have only a root partition, and store everything on that, things are slightly more awkward. Perhaps you have an MS-DOS or Windows partition you could use? Or you have the ramdisk driver in your kernel, maybe as a module? To use the ramdisk (assuming a kernel more recent than 1.3.48), say the following:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ram0 bs=1k count=2048
# mke2fs -v -m 0 /dev/ram0 2048
# mount -t ext2 /dev/ram0 /mnt
This creates a 2MB ramdisk volume, and mounts it on /mnt.
A short word of warning: if you use kerneld (or its replacement
kmod in 2.2.x and later 2.1.x kernels) to automatically load and unload
kernel modules, then don't unmount the ramdisk until you've copied any files
from it onto non-volatile storage. Once you unmount it, kerneld
assumes it can unload the module (after the usual waiting period), and once
this happens, the memory gets re-used by other parts of the kernel, losing
all the painstaking hours you just spent recovering your data.
If you have a Zip, Jaz, or LS-120 drive, or something similar, it would probably be a good choice for a rescue partition location. Otherwise, you'll just have to stick with floppies.
The other thing you're likely to need is a program which can read the
necessary data from the middle of the partition device. At a pinch, dd
will do the job, but to read from, say, 600 MB into an 800 MB partition,
dd insists on reading but ignoring the first 600 MB. This takes a not
inconsiderable amount of time, even on fast disks. My way round this was to
write a program which will seek to the middle of the partition. It's called
fsgrab; you can find the source package on
my website
or on
Metalab
(and mirrors). If you want to use this method, the rest of this mini-Howto
assumes that you have fsgrab.
If none of the files you are trying to recover were more than 12 blocks long
(where a block is usually one kilobyte), then you won't need fsgrab.
If you need to use fsgrab but don't want to download and build it, it
is fairly straightforward to translate an fsgrab command-line to one
for dd. If we have
fsgrab -c count -s skip device
then the corresponding (but typically much slower) dd command is
dd bs=1k if=device count=count skip=skip
I must warn you that, although fsgrab functioned perfectly for me, I can
take no responsibility for how it performs. It was really a very quick and
dirty kludge just to get things to work. For more details on the lack of
warranty, see the `No Warranty' section in the COPYING file included with
it (the GNU General Public Licence).
The next step is to ask the file system which inodes have recently been
freed. This is a task you can accomplish with debugfs. Start
debugfs with the name of the device on which the file system is stored:
# debugfs /dev/hda5
If you want to modify the inodes directly, add a -w option to enable
writing to the file system:
# debugfs -w /dev/hda5
The debugfs command to find the deleted inodes is lsdel. So, type
the command at the prompt:
debugfs: lsdel
After much wailing and grinding of disk mechanisms, a long list is piped into
your favourite pager (the value of $PAGER). Now you'll want to
save a copy of this somewhere else. If you have less, you can type
-o followed by the name of an output file. Otherwise, you'll have to
arrange to send the output elsewhere. Try this:
debugfs: quit
# echo lsdel | debugfs /dev/hda5 > lsdel.out
Now, based only on the deletion time, the size, the type, and the numerical permissions and owner, you must work out which of these deleted inodes are the ones you want. With luck, you'll be able to spot them because they're the big bunch you deleted about five minutes ago. Otherwise, trawl through that list carefully.
I suggest that if possible, you print out the list of the inodes you want to recover. It will make life a lot easier.
debugfs has a stat command which prints details about an inode.
Issue the command for each inode in your recovery list. For example, if you're
interested in inode number 148003, try this:
debugfs: stat <148003>
Inode: 148003 Type: regular Mode: 0644 Flags: 0x0 Version: 1
User: 503 Group: 100 Size: 6065
File ACL: 0 Directory ACL: 0
Links: 0 Blockcount: 12
Fragment: Address: 0 Number: 0 Size: 0
ctime: 0x31a9a574 -- Mon May 27 13:52:04 1996
atime: 0x31a21dd1 -- Tue May 21 20:47:29 1996
mtime: 0x313bf4d7 -- Tue Mar 5 08:01:27 1996
dtime: 0x31a9a574 -- Mon May 27 13:52:04 1996
BLOCKS:
594810 594811 594814 594815 594816 594817
TOTAL: 6
If you have a lot of files to recover, you'll want to automate this. Assuming
that your lsdel list of inodes to recover in is in lsdel.out, try
this:
# cut -c1-6 lsdel.out | grep "[0-9]" | tr -d " " > inodes
This new file inodes contains just the numbers of the inodes to recover,
one per line. We save it because it will very likely come in handy later on.
Then you just say:
# sed 's/^.*$/stat <\0>/' inodes | debugfs /dev/hda5 > stats
and stats contains the output of all the stat commands.
This part is either very easy or distinctly less so, depending on whether the file you are trying to recover is more than 12 blocks long.
If the file was no more than 12 blocks long, then the block numbers of all
its data are stored in the inode: you can read them directly out of the
stat output for the inode. Moreover, debugfs has a command which
performs this task automatically. To take the example we had before, repeated
here:
debugfs: stat <148003>
Inode: 148003 Type: regular Mode: 0644 Flags: 0x0 Version: 1
User: 503 Group: 100 Size: 6065
File ACL: 0 Directory ACL: 0
Links: 0 Blockcount: 12
Fragment: Address: 0 Number: 0 Size: 0
ctime: 0x31a9a574 -- Mon May 27 13:52:04 1996
atime: 0x31a21dd1 -- Tue May 21 20:47:29 1996
mtime: 0x313bf4d7 -- Tue Mar 5 08:01:27 1996
dtime: 0x31a9a574 -- Mon May 27 13:52:04 1996
BLOCKS:
594810 594811 594814 594815 594816 594817
TOTAL: 6
This file has six blocks. Since this is less than the limit of 12, we get
debugfs to write the file into a new location, such as
/mnt/recovered.000:
debugfs: dump <148003> /mnt/recovered.000
Of course, this can also be done with fsgrab; I'll present it here as an
example of using it:
# fsgrab -c 2 -s 594810 /dev/hda5 > /mnt/recovered.000
# fsgrab -c 4 -s 594814 /dev/hda5 >> /mnt/recovered.000
With either debugfs or fsgrab, there will be some garbage at the end
of /mnt/recovered.000, but that's fairly unimportant. If you want to
get rid of it, the simplest method is to take the Size field from the
inode, and plug it into the bs option in a dd command line:
# dd count=1 if=/mnt/recovered.000 of=/mnt/resized.000 bs=6065
Of course, it is possible that one or more of the blocks that made up your file has been overwritten. If so, then you're out of luck: that block is gone forever. (But just imagine if you'd unmounted sooner!)
The problems appear when the file has more than 12 data blocks. It pays here to know a little of how UNIX file systems are structured. The file's data is stored in units called `blocks'. These blocks may be numbered sequentially. A file also has an `inode', which is the place where information such as owner, permissions, and type are kept. Like blocks, inodes are numbered sequentially, although they have a different sequence. A directory entry consists of the name of the file and an inode number.
But with this state of affairs, it is still impossible for the kernel to find the data corresponding to a directory entry. So the inode also stores the location of the file's data blocks, as follows:
Read that again: I know it's complex, but it's also important.
Now, the kernel implementation for all versions up to and including 2.0.36 unfortunately zeroes all indirect blocks (and doubly indirect blocks, and so on) when deleting a file. So if your file was longer than 12 blocks, you have no guarantee of being able to find even the numbers of all the blocks you need, let alone their contents.
The only method I have been able to find thus far is to assume that the file was not fragmented: if it was, then you're in trouble. Assuming that the file was not fragmented, there are several layouts of data blocks, according to how many data blocks the file used:
The block numbers are stored in the inode, as described above.
After the direct blocks, count one for the indirect block, and then there are 256 data blocks.
As before, there are 12 direct blocks, a (useless) indirect block, and 256 blocks. These are followed by one (useless) doubly indirect block, and 256 repetitions of one (useless) indirect block and 256 data blocks.
The layout of the first 65804 blocks is as above. Then follow one (useless) triply indirect block and 256 repetitions of a `doubly indirect sequence'. Each doubly indirect sequence consists of a (useless) doubly indirect block, followed by 256 repetitions of one (useless) indirect block and 256 data blocks.
Of course, even if these assumed data block numbers are correct, there is no guarantee that the data in them is intact. In addition, the longer the file was, the less chance there is that it was written to the file system without appreciable fragmentation (except in special circumstances).
You should note that I assume throughout that your blocksize is 1024 bytes, as this is the standard value. If your blocks are bigger, some of the numbers above will change. Specifically: since each block number is 4 bytes long, blocksize/4 is the number of block numbers that can be stored in each indirect block. So every time the number 256 appears in the discussion above, replace it with blocksize/4. The `number of blocks required' boundaries will also have to be changed.
Let's look at an example of recovering a longer file.
debugfs: stat <1387>
Inode: 148004 Type: regular Mode: 0644 Flags: 0x0 Version: 1
User: 503 Group: 100 Size: 1851347
File ACL: 0 Directory ACL: 0
Links: 0 Blockcount: 3616
Fragment: Address: 0 Number: 0 Size: 0
ctime: 0x31a9a574 -- Mon May 27 13:52:04 1996
atime: 0x31a21dd1 -- Tue May 21 20:47:29 1996
mtime: 0x313bf4d7 -- Tue Mar 5 08:01:27 1996
dtime: 0x31a9a574 -- Mon May 27 13:52:04 1996
BLOCKS:
8314 8315 8316 8317 8318 8319 8320 8321 8322 8323 8324 8325 8326 8583
TOTAL: 14
There seems to be a reasonable chance that this file is not fragmented: certainly, the first 12 blocks listed in the inode (which are all data blocks) are contiguous. So, we can start by retrieving those blocks:
# fsgrab -c 12 -s 8314 /dev/hda5 > /mnt/recovered.001
Now, the next block listed in the inode, 8326, is an indirect block, which we can ignore. But we trust that it will be followed by 256 data blocks (numbers 8327 through 8582).
# fsgrab -c 256 -s 8327 /dev/hda5 >> /mnt/recovered.001
The final block listed in the inode is 8583. Note that we're still looking good in terms of the file being contiguous: the last data block we wrote out was number 8582, which is 8327 + 255. This block 8583 is a doubly indirect block, which we can ignore. It is followed by up to 256 repetitions of an indirect block (which is ignored) followed by 256 data blocks. So doing the arithmetic quickly, we issue the following commands. Notice that we skip the doubly indirect block 8583, and the indirect block 8584 immediately (we hope) following it, and start at block 8585 for data.
# fsgrab -c 256 -s 8585 /dev/hda5 >> /mnt/recovered.001
# fsgrab -c 256 -s 8842 /dev/hda5 >> /mnt/recovered.001
# fsgrab -c 256 -s 9099 /dev/hda5 >> /mnt/recovered.001
# fsgrab -c 256 -s 9356 /dev/hda5 >> /mnt/recovered.001
# fsgrab -c 256 -s 9613 /dev/hda5 >> /mnt/recovered.001
# fsgrab -c 256 -s 9870 /dev/hda5 >> /mnt/recovered.001
Adding up, we see that so far we've written 12 + (7 * 256) blocks, which is 1804. The `stat' results for the inode gave us a `blockcount' of 3616; unfortunately these blocks are 512 bytes long (as a hangover from UNIX), so we really want 3616/2 = 1808 blocks of 1024 bytes. That means we need only four more blocks. The last data block written was number 10125. As we've been doing so far, we skip an indirect block (number 10126); we can then write those last four blocks.
# fsgrab -c 4 -s 10127 /dev/hda5 >> /mnt/recovered.001
Now, with some luck the entire file has been recovered successfully.
This method is, on the surface, much easier. However, as mentioned above, it cannot yet cope with files longer than 12 blocks.
For each inode you want to recover, you must set the usage count to one, and
set the deletion time to zero. This is done with the mi (modify inode)
command in debugfs. Some sample output, modifying inode 148003 from
above:
debugfs: mi <148003>
Mode [0100644]
User ID [503]
Group ID [100]
Size [6065]
Creation time [833201524]
Modification time [832708049]
Access time [826012887]
Deletion time [833201524] 0
Link count [0] 1
Block count [12]
File flags [0x0]
Reserved1 [0]
File acl [0]
Directory acl [0]
Fragment address [0]
Fragment number [0]
Fragment size [0]
Direct Block #0 [594810]
Direct Block #1 [594811]
Direct Block #2 [594814]
Direct Block #3 [594815]
Direct Block #4 [594816]
Direct Block #5 [594817]
Direct Block #6 [0]
Direct Block #7 [0]
Direct Block #8 [0]
Direct Block #9 [0]
Direct Block #10 [0]
Direct Block #11 [0]
Indirect Block [0]
Double Indirect Block [0]
Triple Indirect Block [0]
That is, I set the deletion time to 0 and the link count to 1 and just pressed return for each of the other fields. Granted, this is a little unwieldy if you have a lot of files to recover, but I think you can cope. If you'd wanted chrome, you'd have used a graphical `operating system' with a pretty `Recycle Bin'.
By the way: the mi output refers to a `Creation time' field in the
inode. This is a lie! (Or misleading, anyway.) The fact of the matter is
that you cannot tell on a UNIX file system when a file was created. The
st_ctime member of a struct stat refers to the `inode change time',
that is, the last time when any inode details were changed. Here endeth
today's lesson.
Note that more recent versions of debugfs than the one I'm using probably
do not include some of the fields in the listing above (specifically,
Reserved1 and (some of?) the fragment fields).
Once you've modified the inodes, you can quit debugfs and say:
# e2fsck -f /dev/hda5
The idea is that each of the deleted files has been literally undeleted, but
none of them appear in any directory entries. The e2fsck program can
detect this, and will add a directory entry for each file in the
/lost+found directory of the file system. (So if the partition is
normally mounted on /usr, the files will now appear in
/usr/lost+found when you next mount it.) All that still remains to
be done is to work out the name of each file from its contents, and return
it to its correct place in the file system tree.
When you run e2fsck, you will get some informative output, and some
questions about what damage to repair. Answer `yes' to everything that refers
to `summary information' or to the inodes you've changed. Anything else I
leave up to you, although it's usually a good idea to say `yes' to all the
questions. When e2fsck finishes, you can remount the file system.
Actually, there's an alternative to having e2fsck leave the files in
/lost+found: you can use debugfs to create a link in the
file system to the inode. Use the link command in debugfs after
you've modified the inode:
debugfs: link <148003> foo.txt
This creates a file called foo.txt in what debugfs thinks is the
current directory; foo.txt will be your file. You'll still need to run
e2fsck to fix the summary information and block counts and so on.
Yes. In fact, I believe it already has. Although as of this writing, current stable kernels (in the 2.0.x series) zero indirect blocks, this does not apply to development kernels in the 2.1.x series, nor to the stable 2.2.x series. As I write this on 2 February 1999, kernel 2.2.1 was released a few days ago; Linux vendors are likely to start producing distributions containing and supporting 2.2.x kernels a month or two from now.
Once the indirect-zeroing limitation has been overcome in the production
kernels, a lot of my objections to the technique of modifying inodes by hand
will disappear. At the same time, it will also become possible to use the
dump command in debugfs on long files, and to conveniently use
other undeletion tools.
As it happens, there are. Unfortunately, I believe that they currently suffer from the same problem as the manual inode modification technique: indirect blocks are unrecoverable. However, given the likelihood that this will shortly no longer be a problem, it's well worth looking these programs out now.
I have written a tool called e2recover, which is essentially a Perl
wrapper around fsgrab. It makes a reasonable amount of effort to deal
with zeroed indirect blocks, and seems to work fairly well as long as there
was no fragmentation. It also correctly sets the permissions (and when
possible the ownership) of recovered files, and even makes sure that
recovered files have the correct length.
I originally wrote e2recover for the forthcoming major update to this
Howto; unfortunately this means that much of the useful documentation for
e2recover is scheduled for inclusion in that update. Be that as it
may, it should be useful now; it can be downloaded from
my web site, and
soon from Metalab.
Scott D. Heavner is the author of lde, the Linux Disk Editor. It can
be used as both a binary disk editor, and as an equivalent to debugfs
for ext2 and minix file systems, and even for xia file systems (though xia
support is no longer available in 2.1.x and 2.2.x kernels). It has some
features for assisting undeletion, both by walking the block list for a
file, and by grepping through disk contents. It also has some fairly useful
documentation on basic file system concepts, as well as a document on how to
use it for undeletion. Version 2.4 of lde is available on
Metalab
and mirrors, or on
the author's web site.
Another possibility is offered by the GNU Midnight Commander, mc. This
is a full-screen file management tool, based AFAIK on a certain MS-DOS
program commonly known as `NC'. mc supports the mouse on the Linux
console and in an xterm, and provides virtual file systems which allow
tricks like cd-ing to a tarfile. Among its virtual file systems is one
for ext2 undeletion. It all sounds very handy, although I must admit I
don't use the program myself -- I prefer good old-fashioned shell commands.
To use the undeletion feature, you have to configure the program with the
--with-ext2undel option; you'll also need the development libraries and
include files that come with the e2fsprogs package. The version
provided in
Debian GNU/Linux is
built in this way; the same may apply to packages for other Linux
distributions. Once the program is built, you can tell it to cd
undel:/dev/hda5, and get a `directory listing' of deleted files. Like
many current undeletion tools, it handles zeroed indirect blocks poorly --
it typically just recovers the first 12k of long files.
The current version may be downloaded from the Midnight Commander ftp site.
I intend to produce regular updates to this document as long as I have
both enough time to do it, and something interesting to say. This means
that I am eager to hear comments from readers. Could my writing be clearer?
Can you think of something that would make matters easier? Is there some
new tool that does it all automatically? Whatever. If you have something
to say about this document or about the fsgrab or e2recover tools,
drop me a line on
[email protected].
`If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.' (Isaac Newton)
This mini-Howto was originally derived from a posting in the
comp.os.linux.misc
newsgroup by Robin Glover
[email protected].
I would like to thank Robin for graciously allowing me to rework his ideas into
this mini-Howto.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank once again all the people who've written to me about the Howto. Receiving grateful comments makes the effort worth while.
Some bibliographic references:
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This document is Copyright � 1997, 1999 Aaron Crane
[email protected].
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copyright notice, but may not be changed without permission from either the
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The Linux HOWTO Coordinator is currently Tim Bynum
[email protected].