[RndTbl] Data recovery

John Lange john.lange at bighostbox.com
Mon Dec 22 22:31:39 CST 2003


Well let me just say that an ENORMOUS blue ribbon goes out to Jeff Green
for his suggestion of using dd_rescue!

It's taken me a few days to run through the entire process (mostly
because I've been preoccupied with family Christmas activities) of
recovering my old hard disk but dd_rescue did the trick!

After letting dd_rescue run (it took a long time) I then ran fsck -y on
the new image (which also took a long time) and was able to mount the
drive!

At first I was dismayed because the new drive image was empty except
lost+found. But lost+found had loads of stuff and I was eventually able
to locate my old home directory and copy out the files I was looking
for! woohoo!

I never did have to resort to the "drive in the freezer trick" but
thanks to everyone who made suggestions and as I said, the biggest
thanks to Jeff Green!

Merry Christmas!

-- 
John Lange
BigHostBox.com
(204) 885 0872

On Sat, 2003-12-20 at 08:32, Jeff Green wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have had some success recovering data from a bad hard drive using a program 
> called 'dd_rescue' (find it here: http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/) 
> which is basically like 'dd' but will continue copying even if there are bad 
> blocks (by skipping them). So you may be able to make a mountable disk image 
> of your drive (assuming the mechanical parts still work well enough to copy 
> enough data), though you may have to 'fsck' the image. It is important to 
> note that "forcing" the drive to continue to read when there are errors has 
> the potential to cause even greater damage to the drive. 
> 
> Jeff Green
> 
> On December 19, 2003 05:47 pm, John Lange wrote:
> > Thanks to everyone that replied with suggestions. Great response!
> >
> > I've never heard of the freezer thing before. I'm going to give it a
> > whirl! If I manage to recover anything I'll be sure to inform the group
> > what I've learned.
> >
> > Merry Christmas everyone.
> >
> > Regards,
> 
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