Ffs2recov

Utility to recover UFS2 filesystems

This is the UFS2 version of ffsrecov, heavily and I do mean heavily based on John-Mark Gurney’s program of the same name. It does basically the same thing, only it’s a little more resistant to crashes caused by bad pointers, offsets and the like, and it does a little more than his did. Don’t contact him for problems with this program, it’s definitely my fault if it breaks.

This program is not ready for prime time. It has some shortfalls, it has a bunch of new options that are mostly undocumented and the manpage could stand to be rewritten. One good thing is that it now uses the libufs library and is therefore not as dependent on carrying around low-level code.

On the other hand, it worked for me. Using this tool, I was able to recover almost all of a several-hundred-gigabyte file system that had been stomped by a misconfigured RAID controller. That’s why I wrote the thing in the first place, in fact. With the right knowledge and a lot of patience, it is possible to recover most or all of a trashed file system, at least if it’s not too trashed.

I’m releasing it under the Berkeley two-clause license in the hope that someone with more time will pick it up, polish it and make something a little more useful out of it.

Frank Mayhar frank@exit.com