Re: Parted resizing FAT32 => overwriting?

[Andrew Clausen]

On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 04:54:33PM -0600, Ryan Underwood wrote:
> I deleted a ReiserFS partition and used parted to resize a pre-existing
> FAT32 partition over the whole previous space of the Reiser partition.
> Afterwards, I realized a mistake and tried to recover the data from the
> Reiser portion (knowing the start location) by using parted to scan for
> the partition start.  But parted refused to find the start of the old
> partition (within the resized FAT32 one).
> 
> Does the FAT32 partition need to be deleted now in order for parted to
> find an old Reiser superblock within that partition (it cannot be
> downsized to the original size)?

Yes.  Parted will not "rescue" a file system if the resulting
partition would overlap with other partitions.

I recommend you copy your entire hard disk to another hard disk, and
play around with your rescue operation on the copy.

> Or does the FAT32 conversion somehow
> overwrite data in the latter portion of the filesystem, that has not
> been written to by normal filesystem operation yet?

This is unlikely, unless your fat32 file system was very full, and
more space was needed for the file allocation tables at the start...

Cheers,
Andrew