Update massacred ext4 partition, trying to recover lost ROMs collection

[remino]

Hi,

I tried updating to the latest version of RetroPie using RetroPie-Setup, but for reasons I can't understand, it completely massacred my ext4 partition on the microSD card. I can no longer boot and all files are inaccessible. And no, I thought I had a backup, but I don't have any.

I imaged by microSD card in an image on my Mac, which I use in a Ubuntu VirtualBox VM to see if there are any way to recover the files within. The image file is seen as /dev/sdb2, but cannot be mounted.

When I grep /dev/sdb2 for “retropie” or my own username, I can see there are still at least plain text files somewhere in the image. But when I try to scan the file system, it cannot read the superblock. I tried looking for backup superblocks, but there seems to be none. (I'm not sure how an update could have magically wiped all superblock backups.)

Is there any way to force a tool to scrub a faulty ext4 filesystem for directories and maybe recover files that way? I had no luck with fsck, testdisk, ext4magic, and foremost.

[mitu]

Could be that the problem is with the card and any recovery stumbles on some hw errors.

Try using dd_rescue to save the partition to a file and then running the recovery tools over the file produced. I think brew has a ddrescue formula you can install and run it directly from macOS, instead of going through the USB emulation in VBox.

[chipsnblip]

i've had good results with PhotoRec

[remino]

I'm running dd_rescue, to see if this changes anything, but running PhotoRec on my previously dumped image seems to only yield dozens of text files and a font file. If the ROMs were intact, it should have at least picked the the Zip files for my MAME ROMs. I think I'm running out of luck.

[remino]

To bring some closure here, I finally gave up on this and rebuilt my microSD card with RetroPie 4.3. As for the ROMs, well, I'm sure I can manage to rebuild my collection.

[edmaul69]

@remino just make sure you keep updated backups.