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I have a problem with a tar archive

I have tried the solutions mentioned on this other thread Tar error: Unexpected EOF in archive but my issue has arrisen in a different way.

history.

I got a new laptop after my old Ubuntu laptop died. I pulled out the HDD and zipped up my old home directory.

After installing Ubuntu on my new system, I copied over the OLDhome.tar.gz file.

I extracted a few files individually, but didn't really need anything on the old home untill recently.

I opened the archive with the the default archive manager that is shipped with Ubuntu just recently and whilst opening I get the error message above.

The original home drive was about 30gb in size (before being zipped up). I can 'unzip' the archive and it comes to about 1.2 GB, if I use the gzrecover utility I can extract only a small number of the original files and directories (using cpio).

here are my questions. Is there any way that I can 'recover' the original file that I had saved to my disk (remember I was able to open this and extract files from it previously), as I get the impression that the file is now considerably smaller that it was.

Has this been caused by my extraction of a few individual files deep inside the archive?

Will there still be a 'footprint' of the original archive on the disk (much like how deleting a file only tags the sectors on the disk to allow them to be overwritten), if so is there a util to get to it?

I have now lost some semi important files that I didn't want to loose thinking that my archive was a reasonable backup of them.

The archive was made using the default archiver om xubuntu 12.04 (64 bit).

The original home is long gone, I used the external drive to backup my wifes pc before 'cleaning' it out and re-installing windows for her. The drive has been 'formated' more than once (remember also I could access the archive a few weeks ago and extracted a few files that I needed from it).

thanks in advance for any advice.

David.

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  • Ouch. It sounds as though you'd exhausted the obvious alternatives. – thb Jun 08 '12 at 01:14
  • @thb indeed, ouch. I'm particularly agravated because I didn't just uncompress the archive in the first place, when I found I could extract a single file I was very pleased (stupid really when HDD space is so easy to find now). – DaveM Jun 08 '12 at 12:44
  • Looks like i'm on for tumbleweeding this question also! Does no-one have any suggestions (time travel would possibly be accepted !) – DaveM Jun 14 '12 at 13:39
  • This is most regrettable. You may be right: no one who read your question knew an answer. I hope for your sake that the lost data is replaceable at reasonable cost. – thb Jun 15 '12 at 00:39
  • The data is certainly not "that" important, electronic copies of paper files is the stuff I am most concerned with, some web pages for playing with at home etc. Something I have noticed, i managed to do a partial repair, and extract some of the data. One of the extracted files is saying z:\helpDocs\perso this file is zero length and I guess comes from an archived copied from where I work (I dual boot at work), I wonder if this file is causing me the problems? – DaveM Jun 19 '12 at 21:00

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