File System Explodage... (last ditch attempt)

[Valkaiser]

Well, I'm pretty sure that this is hosed beyond all help, but I'll throw it out there on the off chance that I've missed something.
On one of my machines I'm running a file system with 16KB clusters, which limits the size of data on a single partition to 256GB (unfortunately for me, I didn't research that earlier). Anyway, I managed to exceed this limit by a good amount before the file system exploded and I was unable to access any files in the directory that I had been adding new data to (all other directories/files were unaffected). Is there any way you gurus know of to save the affected files? The machine is running Debian (release Woody I believe, don't ask).

[Warrior4Christ]

Why should it let you save data there that it can't retrieve? That sounds like very bad design...
I don't know enough specifics about Linux file systems/tools to comment further...

[Valkaiser]

Well you see, the data is still there, the only problem is that the system that knows where exactly the data is has been corrupted.

[Mithrandir]

How many files? How much do you need them? Off the top of my head...

Could you use dd to create a copy of the filesystem in question on another device? You could try to mount said FS under some other instantiation of linux. I have no idea if it would work right or not, though.

You could also look at the inodes (ls -ali [on my machine, the inode is the first item listed] ) and see where the requested files are located. That would allow you the opportunity to look at the associated areas of the drive and potentially copy the data to another location.
[ inode info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode ]

Alternatively, could you use something like rsync to copy the file to another drive/machine? You might have to mount said directory in another machine to accomplish this, though.

Anyway, those are my initial thoughts...

[creed4]

Sometime, I have been able to retrieve data with a live cd.