Recovering XFS Partition of Type FAT16

[Volkan YAZICI]

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 6:53 PM, Eric Sandeen <sandeen at sandeen.net> wrote:
> 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.

I was struggling to boot an ISO image from a USB disk, hence I suspect
that I had probably set the type of the host machine partition
(/dev/sda1) to FAT16 with fdisk, instead of USB disk partition
(/dev/sdb1). Then in the next boot, Linux doesn't come up and
complained about XFS issues. Hence I rebooted the machine and repaired
the fs with xfs_repair. This time partition is mounted properly but a
significant portion of the disk content is missing. Then in the fdisk
-l output I realized that /dev/sda1 is set to FAT16. (Isn't it strange
that I can xfs_repair and mount a partition of type FAT16?) Later I
set the type of /dev/sda1 to Linux, but nothing changed. I called
xfs_repair again and tried mounting again, no luck: same fs size
(20GB), same missing contents.

For the xfs_repair output... Honestly, I don't remember and I don't
think I can reproduce the situation.


Best.