UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

If you have data on an external drive and you re-partition the drive (no format), is the data totally gone?

(The hardware and OS might be good to know.) Totally gone, probably not. Try partitioning it back and see if you have anything. Or pull out your checkbook and hire a data recovery firm.

Solaris 5.8 Sunblade 1000 (I think). How do you partition back? The filesystem slices for the new partition is the same as the old.

You partition back with the same commands you used to repartition the disk. This assumes that you somehow remember the original configuration. But if you overwrote the partition table with a new partition table that had the exact same layout as the original, then you should be ok.

c1t9d0s0 repartitioned to c1t9d0s0 (the same layout). Still possible??

I don't know what that question is supposed to mean. Why not just try the disk and see if the data is there? That would take like 5 minutes.

Well I'm not sure if I am asking the correct question. I'll try to break down what happened and why I'm asking.

We have a server with one internal harddrive and one external harddrive. The internal harddrive went bad. At the time df -k output looked like this:

Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c2t1d0s0 6193583 4879259 1252389 80% /
/proc 0 0 0 0% /proc
/dev/dsk/c2t1d0s3 3143371 1454721 1625783 48% /sc
/dev/dsk/c1t9d0s3 1518682 170584 1287351 12% /apps
/dev/dsk/c1t9d0s1 2024915 759188 1204980 39% /home
/dev/dsk/c1t9d0s4 981985 105745 817321 12% /osa
swap 1213536 72 1213464 1% /tmp
/dev/dsk/c1t9d0s7 984355 596227 329067 65% /sc/datedir
/dev/dsk/c1t9d0s0 2024915 93308 1870860 5% /sc/odct
/dev/dsk/c1t9d0s6 981985 217162 705904 24% /usr/local
/dev/dsk/c2t1d0s4 6287480 1089796 5134810 18% /sc/pacbell/arc
/dev/dsk/c2t1d0s5 8383553 2841470 5458248 35% /sc/pacbell/onl
/dev/dsk/c2t1d0s6 10481069 1203570 9172689 12% /sc/pacbell/ofc
fd 0 0 0 0% /dev/fd
mnttab 0 0 0 0% /etc/mnttab
swap 1213480 16 1213464 1% /var/run

So I got a new harddrive and loaded the OS via cdrom. During this process, it asked me to partition the disks. So I did. Now my df -k output looks like this:

Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c2t1d0s0 4906998 1133364 3724565 24% /
/proc 0 0 0 0% /proc
fd 0 0 0 0% /dev/fd
mnttab 0 0 0 0% /etc/mnttab
swap 1302256 8 1302248 1% /var/run
swap 1303576 1328 1302248 1% /tmp
/dev/dsk/c2t1d0s3 2527543 683863 1793130 28% /sc
/dev/dsk/c1t9d0s4 942447 105666 780235 12% /osa
/dev/dsk/c1t9d0s3 1501423 67715 1373652 5% /apps
/dev/dsk/c1t9d0s1 2004703 124488 1820074 7% /home
/dev/dsk/c1t9d0s7 942447 9 885892 1% /sc/datedir
/dev/dsk/c1t9d0s6 942447 112938 772963 13% /usr/local
/dev/dsk/c1t9d0s0 2004703 9 1944553 1% /sc/odct
/dev/dsk/c2t1d0s6 8477813 9 8393026 1% /sc/pacbell/ofc
/dev/dsk/c2t1d0s4 5085294 9 5034433 1% /sc/pacbell/arc
/dev/dsk/c2t1d0s5 6778901 10 6711102 1% /sc/pacbell/onl

The c1t9d0 is my external drive, which did not have the problem. I had data in there but since I repartitioned, the data is not there. Is the old data retrievable?