BIG Awww Sh_t !!!

[John Burton]

Hopefully one of you brilliant folks out there can help out
on this problem...

Recently the SA for the system was trying to install an optical
disk on the system (both WORM & Erasable). According to
the instructions he was supposed to mount it as hdisk1
(after setting up hdisk1 as a removable disk). everything
worked fine (well almost) except writing to the disk was a 
factor of 20 slower than the read (10KB/sec vs 200KB/sec).
The manufacturer said writing was supposed to be ~150KB/sec.
After playing around for awhile with customer support on the
phone (not IBM's customer support) it was decided it was a 
hardware problem. Thats not the problem...the problem is
that while playing around mounting & unmounting the optical
disk, one time it was mounted as /dev/hd1 instead of /dev/hdisk1.
unfortunately /dev/hd1 is the mount for /u (the user directory!).
Also unfortunately, a file was copied to the optical disk when
it was mounted like this. well, the long & the short of it
is that all of a sudden, all the directories under /u disappeared.
when he cd to /u and then did an ls he got ". file not found".
when he did a "more /dev/hd1", instead of the usual semi-readable
data, he got a copy of the file he had copied to the optical
disk. also  doing  "more /dev/rhd1" produced the same results...
fsck didn't help much, it printed a list of errors sequentially
for I = 0 to at least 2048 saying possible file size difference,
then it said that . and .. were missing and it couldn't recover them.
it appears (doing an ff) that the files are still there (salted
away in lost+found) but are inaccessable (/u/. and /u/..
are missing). the obvious solution is to reconstruct /u
from the latest backup, which was done just prior to mucking
with the optical disk, but a fair amount of work had been done 
since the backup, and we'd like to recover that if possible. 
anyone have any suggestions?

John

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| John Burton                                                        |
| G & A Technical Software                                           |
| jcburt at gatsibm.larc.nasa.gov                                       |
| jcburt at cs.wm.edu                                                   |
|                                                                    |
| Disclaimer: Hey, what can I say...These are *my* views, not those  |
|             of anyone else, be they employer, school, or government|
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