Can I recover a deleted volume directory?
A partition and disk imaging/cloning program
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steven_shiau
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Hi,
I am in a complete crisis. If anyone can advise me, I'd be very grateful.
I tried to correct my Spotlight indexing by using a combination of the sudo mdutil -E / , sudo mdutil -i on / , and sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100 commands from the terminal.
I am not sure what happened, but the computer went into an interminable color-wheel and, when I shut down and rebooted after an hour or two, I found that both my main drive and my backup drive had severe problems.
DiskUtility volunteered to correct these. I ran it on my main drive and found that my entire directory appears to have been erased.
Disk Warrior cannot repair. Nor can TechTool. Both declare that the directory structure is now beyond repair (which they also say of my former backup clone).
Though I did not run any file repairs on the back up drive, it has also lost all of its files (it shows just one remaining
file:///Volumes/Eric's Backup/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi - whatever that is). Both physical disks were partitioned - and the four partitions have survived intact. But the system boot volume on each disk has lost every last file.
I gather that I inadvertently deleted the root folder inside of the Spotlight index (perhaps through an injudicious space), and that it went on to do the same to the backup disk.
I've tried FileSalvage to scavenge some 350Gb of applications, e-mails, photos, iTunes, and movies (most of which are unnamed). These will all be unlabelled and randomly organised by extension type, could take months to sift through, and the list is almost certain to be incomplete. I have no other backups of my system apart from a two year old clone.
Please tell me. Does Clonezilla stand a chance of recovering my lost directory structure on each disk?
Might there be some use of an Undelete routine that might recover the directory alone and thus allow me to salvage either disk?
I don't even know what sort of extension to hunt for in order to attempt such a restore
- nor how I might drop it back into its correct spot on the volume.
All suggestions gratefully received.
This is a late response to your post. I hope you have solve your problem.
As for your question "Does Clonezilla stand a chance of recovering my lost directory structure on each disk?" -> Basically no. However, you might be able to use the program "foremost" in the Clonezilla live to undelete the files.
Good luck!
Steven.