From owner-freebsd-hackers  Wed Oct 29 11:28:38 1997
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Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 11:25:04 -0800
From: Gopakumar H Pillai <gopu@global.com>
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Subject: Help in data recovery
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I am a sysadmin, fairly new to the job. The OS is FreeBSD 2.2.2. I had a
disk sd0s1e of 2GB and sd1s1e of 1GB. In the process of finding out the
device name of the tape drive I did a "tar cvf rsd0 /tmp". The amount of
data I have written over the raw disk is about 20K. This disk has /usr.
I need to retrieve /usr, mainly my mails in /usr/home. How should I go
about it?

I retrieved sd1s1e, i.e. /var and got the /var/mail.

I cannot mount or fsck this device since it complains, improper
superblock. I have another machine with similar partitioning, would that
help?

Also how can I make an exact image of the ruined disk on another one of
the same hardware configuration?

-- 
--Gopu (gopu@global.com)