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Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:16:14 -0800
From: perryh@pluto.rain.com
To: thomas.exner@uni-konstanz.de
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: disk recovery problem(s)
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Thomas Exner <thomas.exner@uni-konstanz.de> wrote:

> when running fsck the first error message is "ROOT INODE UNALLOCATED"
> ...
> Is there a chance to get the data back?

Dunno about current versions, but IIRC some earlier versions of
dump(8) could handle even a badly-corrupted FS.  No harm in trying,
since it will not try to write anything to the FS being dumped.  Of
course, you need to find a place to dump it to (and I would _not_
advise piping the output into restore(8) in this kind of situation
-- save the dumpfile itself somewhere in case you find yourself
needing to hack on restore(8) to extract files from it).