I can't find anything like this on the web, and I have posted to the Ubuntu discussion forums with little success so far, but here goes:
I am running Ubuntu 8.10 desktop (2.6.27-14 generic), with VMware server 2.0. VMware server had some issues with it's networking and hung ubuntu (I know, I was surprised to see that happen), so I had to hard power down my system.
When it came back up, a file system check found tons of lost inodes and moved half my system to lostfound (many many gigs). I backed up the lostfound directory to a portable hard drive.
I installed ubuntu 8.10 on a new partition, upgraded it to 27-14, and copied system files and user information to the broken one in order to get it stable. I was then able to login to my broken system and found some major damage. To the tune of my start-up scripts being gone, many of the progs in etc and bin/sbin being gone, vmware server barely being there at all - only my powered off Virtual Machine directories were left intact with their files still there.
My main problem is that I need to recover my Windows 2003 Server virtual machine, which is gone. I have been able to find the files (from lostfound, Ie. #3122949 (2.4Gb) for another VM (my Apache rpath linux web server which hosts some ESX backup files) which isn't as important. I have 3 months of data in my Win2k3 VM that I need to recover (3 months since my last backup to external media), but I can't find any files large enough in my lostfound that could be the Win2k3 VM files. My local backup directories are also gone, as are my snapshots which were in my Win2k3 Virtual Machine's directory, which is gone.
Can anyone tell me what I can do with my system to try to find the VM? Understandably, the directories that contained my running VM's became derefenced/lost when the system crashed. This is a huge heartache for me because I have some deliverables that I need to recover for a very important client.
Please advise ASAP!!
Thanks,
SypsG