"John Winters" wrote in message
news:biqjrp$qd$1@bennet.home.linuxemporium.co.uk.. .
> >I then proceeded to copy a lot of data (close to filling the drive) to
> >/mnt/storage, with everything still working fine. I actually was
'moving'
> >the data because the drive was brand new and I thought things would be
ok,
>
> Eeeek!

> There are two kinds of people in this world - those who have experienced
> major data loss due to bad practices and those who haven't yet. I'm
afraid
> you've just moved from the second category to the first. I fear you may
> well have to write this off as a learning experience.

Ok, I think there is still some confusion, so I will ask (at least try to
ask) a simple question. Regardless of the way I formatted the drive--to be
honest, I don't remember if I appended a 1 or not, if it (the formatter)
accepts both, that I assume (now) that it is valid.

Moving forward, after I got the drive/partition working and copied
everything to it, I rebooted. I went into fdisk and received this error:

-----
Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by
w(rite).
----

I enter 'w' and it replied "syncing discs" or something similar and drop me
back to the shell.

That's all that I have done to this drive since then. I have not
reformatted it, repartitioned it, nothing. Throughout this entire thread,
whenever I mentioned mkfs or mke2fs, it was what took place BEFORE I copied
all the files (when I was creating the original partition).

Because I haven't done anything except for the 'w' above, I was hoping I
could restore the partition (in whatever state) and get as much data as I
could off of it. I mean logic would lead me to believe the data is still
there, the 'w' command above took about 2 secs. Granted, that might have
wiped out the superblock, but it surely didn't zero out every byte on the
disk (that would take hours).

Does this make sense? I hope this was a really simple overview of what
happened and why I have been so interested in backup superblocks.

Thanks so much,

Tim