The problem is, it wasn't a fs. It was a tar file of .tgz files. And I'm
pretty sure it was newfs'd. Whatever sysinst does. I was able to make a
partition pointing to it. Most of the files are corrupted. One good thing:
did I mention that I also had a gzipped version of this tar file of tgz
files on /usr, which was also newfs'd? Maybe it's possible to stick
them together and fix the holes...

And remember, I'm using the installation floppy...

On Mon, May 27, 2002 at 06:34:06PM +0200, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> Date: Mon, 27 May 2002 18:34:06 +0200
> From: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr>
> To: "Ryan M. McConahy" <rm@m-net.arbornet.org>
> Cc: port-i386@netbsd.org
> Subject: Re: I just mkfs'd my backup!!
> 
> On Mon, May 27, 2002 at 11:47:48AM -0400, Ryan M. McConahy wrote:
> > Ok. I had a 20gig hd, and had a 1.5g partition at the end, and
> > had it in the disklabel nice. Then after repeated torture by
> > the NetBSD install program (it didn't like my new partitioning idea),
> > I forgot to include the partition, and made /home on top of it.
> > The backup was all my personal data, my old Linux setup, 300mb of sources
> > I'd collected over my 28.8kb modem, the NetBSD binaries, the NetBSD source,
> > and generally my life. :( I'd also managed to get a gzipped version of
> > the tar file somewhere else, which I also overwrote intentionally.
> > 
> > Is there any hope of me ever seeing my beloved data again *sob*?
> 
> If you didn't newfs the partition, but just did a partition which overwrote
> this one then it's possible that some data are recoverable.
> If you know the original size/offset, recreate a partition and see what fsck
> can say about it.
> If you don't remember it, try the small program I posted 2 days ago:
> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-i386/2002/05/25/0008.html
> 
> it will locate superblocks, and may help you finding the offset of the
> partition.
> 
> --
> Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
> --