Restore(8)ing a corrupted filesystem

[Aydin Edguer]

A SCSI disk attached to a Sun 3/60 recently began having problems.

I was able to do a full dump of the data from the partition after taking
it offline.  The problem is that a number of the blocks were "bad" and
could not be read during the dump.  Among these blocks was the file that
contained a directory just above the root directory.

The problem arises because although the top of the directory tree is
missing, the data beneath is still there.  I have verified this by
actually looking through the data on the tape (Uggh!).

Figuring that I could extract the information using the -m option of
restore I went ahead with the operation.  The m option (supposedly) lets
you restore information by inode.

No go.  Restore does not admit to the data, even though I can see the
inodes and filenames associated with the inodes in the dump tape.

This is causing a large hunk of important data to be unavailable.  (yeah,
I know, if it was so important why weren't they backing it up often?)

So... the question is, does anyone have a program (or patch for restore)
that will permit me to access the data on the tape?  I would even be
willing for the filenames to be the inode numbers (although matching the
inodes to filenames where they exist would be nice).

Does Sun (or anyone else) even sell such a beast?

Aydin Edguer
edguer at ces.cwru.edu