All files gone after running fsck. How can I recover my files?

Question

I installed Ubuntu server 10.04 LTS. It worked great for many months, until today I decided to run fsck on the system partition and although it warned me, I kept pressing yes and now it will only boot into grub prompt.

I read some article that recommended trying grub reinstall. But before performing grub reinstall, i decided to run fsck again from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for desktop live CD. The fsck painfully passes, now my drive is recognized as ext4 system and I am able to mount it again. However, all i can see is just boot directory and lost&found. I tried to perform grub reinstalling by doing grub-install stuff, now my grub is still not loading right, my files are missing, and the weird thing is that the amount I found used by boot and lost n found is only 5gb and the amount used in he hdd is 8 gb.

So my files must be somewhere in the hdd.

Is there any simple way maybe a GUI tool or something that can recover my files? I only need to retrieve my database backup and everything else can go.

Solution 1

In general I'd suggest burning and booting a live CD such as Ubuntu or SystemRescueCD and using extundelete to recover any deleted files.

Solution 2

Foremost may be able to find the files you care about. I used it to help a friend extract files from a drive that had physically failed with some unrecoverable sectors.

Comments

[jasmines]

What fdisk -l gives?

[cinlung]

I have a backup drive from october 2011. The exact image of the same drive with the same directory structure. I backed it up using clonezilla. Can that somehow help to remap the drive correctly and recover my files? If so, how? Fdisk -l returns sda1 as swap drive 14gb, sda2 as core (my drive name) 140gb. Before fsck this partition was not recognized

[cinlung]

Itried to look into lost and found, i can only find old files not the latest ones.i have not tamper withthe partition nor write anything into it except fsck filling up the lost and found and rebuilding the grub... Which failed

[cinlung]

Will foremost works with linux live? Or is there similar tool under windows? The only linux system i have is the broken server :(

[belacqua]

@cinlung Did you ever have any luck with this?