Gene Heskett wrote:

Hi everybody;

Its Gene, the old f--- ahhh, man, back from 2 weeks worth of trying to make a tv station or 4 out of not very much. Hindered by the help that I was promised doing a disappearing act to goto a funeral in texas on the second day, and turning it into 2 weeks vacation. Damn, I just *love* being thrown to the wolves like that . . .

Unforch, in the process of shutting things down as I was leaving for the western slopes of colorado, I grabbed the wrong line cord and did a rather instant powerdown on this machine, something that appears to be a huge no-no for active ext3 systems. To be exact, it totally wrecked /, something I'm not a happy camper over at all. I was under the impression that ext3 was never in an invalid condition. By-by about 30 gigs of data. fsck reported many thousands of inodes as invalid. Bah!

So I fdisk'ed /dev/hda, re-arranged it a bit, formatted and installed RH8.0, followed by ripping out their KDE and installing the good KDE-3.0.4, or I woudn't even be doing email as evolution doesn't seem to like pop servers at all. It cannot send to one but can suck from one. Go figure.

Anyway, the advise on how to recover useing tar & gzip doesn't seem to want to work. The only way to get dd to actually write a disk file is with dd if=/dev/nst0 bs=32k of=tape.contents.# where the # is a sequence # extension in /tmp. And that only works if an 'mt tell' says its at block 64.

Hey Gene,

What do I do if Amanda doesn't see my index but I know backup exists?

# cd somedir
# mt rewind
2) move forward 1 record on the tape
# mt fsf 1
3) Check to see what that record is...
# dd if=$TAPE bs=32k count=1

5) Count the number of times you had to repeat steps 2 and 3.
6) Rewind the tape
# mt rewind
7) Jump forward to the point you need
# mt fsf ##

9) restore to the current directory

Let me know if you have any questions.

=G=