Ext2fs Undeletion of Directory Structures mini-HOWTO

Tomas Ericsson

tomase@matematik.su.se

Revision History
Revision v0.1.1	14 November 2025	Revised by: T.E.
Initial release.

This document is supposed to be as an complementary to the Ext2fs-Undeletion mini-HOWTO written by Aaron Crane. I really recommend you to carefully study that one before reading this.

Here I will describe a straight forward way of recovering whole directory structures, instead of file by file, that have been removed by a misplaced rm -rf.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

1.1. Disclaimer
1.2. License
1.3. Feedback
1.4. New versions of this document
1.5. Acknowledgements
1.6. Background

2. Preconditions

3. Preparation

4. Finding inodes for deleted directories

5. Analyse of directory dump

6. Locating deleted inodes

7. Activating inodes

8. Adding directory entries

9. Recalculation

10. If /lost+found not empty

11. Final touch

12. References