Our Christmas day power outage finally ended happily. Recall that a Christmas day power outage corrupted an ext3 filesystem that was managed by the Linux LVM. e2retreive ran for almost 3 weeks and in the end was unable to actually recover any files. A bunch of other free/open source programs also failed to do the job.

My initial round of Googling turned up a pieces of software called Kernel by Nucelus Technologies. They offered a demo version of their software which would tell you if it could recover files, but not actually recover them (for that you had to cough up some money). Kernel runs on Windows, but there are versions for lots of operating systems. Given that I thought our problems were more due to LVM rather than ext3, I was a little skeptical that Kernel would be able to do much of anything. I'm glad that I was wrong. Kernel was able to recover all the files off of the disk (you better believe I paid), so we have all of our data back. The only thing I'm unhappy with is that Kernel didn't preserve the file dates, even though it was able to display the dates. Still, I'm very happy to have my data back, and Kernel definitely makes the recommended list. So if you have a corrupted ext3 partition under LVM, Kernel had a decent chance of working.

The Google research that I did has convinced me that using LVM is more dangerous than the convenience of it, so I'll definitely be reformatting the offending disk as plain old ext3.