aard

aard, 1 year ago

First step, in case you didn’t do that yet: Create a disk image of the partition - you don’t want to try data recovery on the actual data. Easiest is just using dd to dump the disk to another drive.

Next try running testdisk on the image to see if it can find the backup superblocks - if it does you can feed that to fsck to restore the filesystem.

If you know the blocksize of the filesystem you can also run mke2fs with the -S parameter - this will just write the superblocks. Again, only do that on a disk image, not the actual drive.

aard, 1 year ago

You can do all of that on the device - but you only get one shot. If you mess up that’s it - so no sensible person would try any form of data rescue directly on the device. Storage is cheap, if you don’t have sufficient space on your computer just get another external disk.

aard, 1 year ago

In that case I’d recommend waiting until next year before attempting recovery.

aard, 1 year ago

Gentoo is useless for learning how things work. Back in the 00s when I still had time to hang out at events it was always quite ridiculous at what kind of basic stuff the gentoo crowd got stuck at - and with the tooling 15+ years more polished now I’d expect what is actually going on is way more hidden than back then.

If you do want to understand how things work just build a minimal system - either on spare hardware, or qemu/kvm. Don’t go with systemd, or other fat userland options - that just makes you compile a lot of dependencies not adding value for learning.

Use some lean init (or just write one yourself), and some lean shell.

aard, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I’d just start from very simple kernel and static init, and work my way up to adding more functionality. I’d use kvm with rootfs on p9fs - that allows playing with it without having to build images. I can throw together the initial invocation, if you’re interested.

Then start building simple core elements in a language allowing easy static linking - I’d use C with dietlibc or go. Start adding core userland programs, explore initramfs (without using something like dracut), add dynamic libraries and explore the dynamic linker, … - if you’re interested we could set up a matrix channel for questions (typically with some lag, though), and do a github repo to follow along.

LFS iirc goes for full desktop - the high level userland is very complex, but easy to understand when you know the basics. You pretty much learn how to compile lots of libraries - which has limited use. A full LFS style desktop I’d no longer recommend nowadays - it’s just too many dependencies to deal with. I used to build my own system (not following LFS) until the Xorg fork made it sigificantly more complicated - and things got just worse since then, and I never was using a complicated UI stack.

edit: I had a few minutes, so I’ve thrown this together github.com/bwachter/lll - you should easily get a kernel with a custom init running, and have enough to start experimenting. If you or anyone else is interested to go deeper I’ll set up a matrix channel for guidance.