Hi all :) I'm using the Rescue Remix 9.10 ISO on CD, to recover some data after accidentally zeroing the start of a hard drive.

I apologise in advance, my information is necessarily incomplete because I'm still in the middle of playing around with it. (I'm working off a copy I made to an identical drive I happened to have...)

The drive was used for Debian Testing, and (off the top of my head) had an LVM strcuture, with a separate partition for /home. Fortunately, I think this means that /home was unscathed by my dd related typo (but I can't be sure). The root partition appears to be absolutely hosed (so no LVM metadata?).

If I run testdisk and tell it to look for an Intel type partition, it finds an extended partition (/dev/sdc1) and a linux partion (/dev/sdc5)... both seem to start in the same place, though. I can't mount them, though, but I've yet to try running e2fsck on the Linux partition.

On the other hand, if I tell it there's no partition, it seems to find three partitions, a Linux, swap and another Linux. The first Linux partition has nothing identifiable in it. The second Linux partition *appears* to have all my personal files in it. Great!

But when I browse it and try to copy my home dir to directory on another mounted ext3 drive, I end up with something like: /mnt/Rescue/username/.profile/username/.profile/username/....

This goes on for as long as I let it. Since I'm copying from a 160GB drive to a 1TB drive, that's a lot.

I eventually killed the process and rebooted, but I'm currently waiting for rm to remove the ridiculously long recursive chain of directories before I can investigate the structure of the original files under testdisk again.

So my question is, has anyone heard of this happening before? What is going on? Is there any hope? (You don't have to answer that last one...)

Thanks for any info.