Recovering XFS Partition of Type FAT16

[Eric Sandeen]

On 7/7/11 6:32 AM, Volkan YAZICI wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Dave Chinner <david at fromorbit.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 04, 2011 at 10:23:55AM +0000, Volkan YAZICI wrote:
>>> I have an XFS partition, which is
>>>
>>> 1) Mistakenly quick formatted as FAT16.
>>> 2) At first, I couldn't see in "fdisk -l" that it is set to FAT16,
>>> instead of Linux. Hence, tried to fix it with xfs_recover. xfs_recover
>>> returned 0, and mount operation succeeded; but mounted fs size
>>> appeared as 20GB (despite it is 350GB) and almost every file was
>>> missing.
>>> 3) Later, I set the type of /dev/sda1 (the only partition in /dev/sda)
>>> to Linux, re-run xfs_recover, but nothing changed: Same fs size (20GB)
>>> and same missing files.
>>
>> What is this xfs_recover tool you speak of? I've never heard of it,
>> I can't find any direct links to it in google (only forum posts from
>> years ago about how great it is) so I have no idea what you've done to
>> your filesystem...
> 
> Sorry, I was writing that mail from a friend's computer, and
> mistakenly typed xfs_recover, instead of xfs_repair.
> 
>> That looks like a newly made 20GB XFS filesystem, not the result of
>> repairing a 350GB filesystem...
> 
> Since I formatted it as FAT16 first, it truncated the fs to 20GB. Then
> calling xfs_repair caused the whole XFS partition appear as of size
> 20GB.

It sounds like something changed your partition table as well as your
filesystem.  Putting the partition table back in place first probably
would have been the better first step, in retrospect.

I can't tell for sure, though, what you've done (did you reparition?
mkfs?  with which tools?  what was the xfs_repair output?) so I'm not
sure what to tell you at this point.

-Eric