1. Introduction

1.1. Disclaimer

The author is not responsible for damages due actions taken based on this document. You will do everything at your own risk.

1.2. License

This document may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the LDP license available at http://www.linuxdoc.org/manifesto.html

1.3. Feedback

Any kind of feedback is welcome. Corrections of errors in this text are of great interest. If someone find things described here useful I really would appreciate to hear that from you.

1.4. New versions of this document

The latest version of this document will be found at http://www.matematik.su.se/~tomase/ext2fs-undeletion/

1.5. Acknowledgements

Thanks to the following persons for correctures etc (in alphabetic order).

• Gabriel Kihlman

• Richard Nyberg

• Mats Oldin

• Tobias Westerblom

1.6. Background

This text has been written while solving my own undeletion problems that I had some time ago. I was about to move some directories from one disk to another. The problem was that the extra disk went corrupted directly after the move for some reason.

So I wanted to get the moved directories back from my original disk. There were totally about 40000 files to recover and I did not feel very much like to search and rename each one of them by hand.

I wanted to get back the whole structure of directories. The same situation would have appeared if I had made an rm -rf to those directories.