Failed to install extundelete-0.2.0 on CentOS 5.6, "error: can't find ext2fs library"

The package you need is not actually installed. Please run yum install e2fsprogs-devel.i386 and try again.

Note that the last column in your yum listing shows "installed" for the first two packages, but shows "base" for the last. That indicates that the package is part of the base group but is not installed.

You may also need to remove the config.cache file in your extundelete source directory before running ./configure again.

On Ubuntu I had to install the e2fslibs-dev package

for someone looking for the same lib in the MacOSX: ext2fs_open is inside e2fsprogs package which is available to install from homebrew with the following command:

brew install e2fsprogs

but the configure will fail to find the libext2fs.a in the default path, so use following escape command to be able to extract correct path:

LDFLAGS="-L$(brew --prefix e2fsprogs)/lib"