URGENT debian linux hep needed. I've lunched an ext3 filesystem.

[short bus president]

Unfortunately, my home directory resided on it. I dunno how it happened, except that famd was running when I shut down last, and maybe that did it, but on starting about an hour ago, the forced fsck on that partition said there were errors and to run fsck manually. I did. But being rather much of a dumbass, I just read enough of the man page to get the syntax, and ran it without the -j switch, frying the journal and rendering it an ext2 filesystem. I rebuilt the journal, and it's all fine and dandy now except that my stuff is gone. And no, I don't have a backup available of my home directory. Dammit.

Is there any way to save this situation without having to reinstall? I'd really like to not have to go through all the updating and installing software and customizing my kernel again.

Help?

[qnr]

1. I'm sorry. I have no idea. Sounds like you might want to ask

on a real Linux or Debian board. I've learned to always reboot at least once when it tells me that I need to run fsck manually, just to make sure. 98% of the time, it turns out to be fine on the reboot.

[short bus president]

2. I tried that. Fun little beastie that debian is, it picked up the

errors everytime.

So long story short, I reinstalled. Everything was back to normal within 2 hours, all customizations and updates back in place, and nothing any worse for the wear. Except all my missing documents. Shit.

;-)

[qnr]

3. :( - my home directory is on a separate hard disk n/t

[short bus president]

4. mine's on a separate primary partition

And this normally wouldn't have been an issue. I usually write myself a script to automate and schedule backup of my home directory contents to a backup directory on a separate disk, but for some reason I hadn't written it yet this time. That's something I should do tonight, come to think of it. ;-)

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

5. Get a second drive.

Set two partitions, swap and home. Linux loves the swap on another drive and so will your drives. Also, I have upgraded many times and never lost any of my home.

Except when my second drive died. :(