Hardrive data rescue programs

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What's the age of your latest backup?

Poll ended at Wed Apr 06, 2005 2:40 pm

A day
2
13%
A week
2
13%
A month
4
27%
Older
7
47%
 
Total votes: 15

kma
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Location: Sweden

Hardrive data rescue programs

Post by kma » Sat Feb 05, 2005 2:40 pm

Unfortunately my HD broke down...guess brand and model, apparently they've had lot of failures... at least I got good reason to buy a new silent Samsung drive.

I didn't lose anything important, but backus are a bit old (I should know better :roll: :oops: :()

But apparently parts of the drive are still working, and of course I want to save anything I could. This was my partition table (with a small comment):

Code: Select all

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 7476 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1       264   2120548+   b  Win95 FAT32   Readable from DOS prompt
/dev/hda2           265       788   4209030    7  HPFS/NTFS     Unreadable, has a few data I want
/dev/hda3           789      1312   4209030   83  Linux         Readable
/dev/hda4          1313      7476  49512330    f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5          1313      1336    192748+  82  Linux swap    
/dev/hda6          1337      2871  12329856    b  Win95 FAT32   Unreadable
/dev/hda7          2872      4406  12329856    b  Win95 FAT32   Unreadable
/dev/hda8          4407      5941  12329856    b  Win95 FAT32   Unreadable
/dev/hda9          5942      7476  12329856    7  HPFS/NTFS     Readable
I managed to save what I wanted from the 'readable' partitons.
Does anyone know of a program that could help? It has to be a linux/DOS tools, Windows try to look at the damaged drive when booting and freezes/fails. (Or maby there is a way to 'hotplug' the damaged drive after booting?)

mathias
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Post by mathias » Sat Feb 05, 2005 5:18 pm

Ouch, did you see if there's anything usefull on knoppix? Or maybe there's something for that on insert, that's what's it's supposed to be for.

I don't have a straight answer to that poll question, I copied some stuff from my linux spinpoint to my windows cuda IV a few days ago, today I tried copying some other stuff, but it didn't work. From windows, that FAT32 partition appears corrupted, scandisk doesn't even want to touch it, it gives some bullshit excuse about not having enough memory, and if that wasn't enough, when I upped the swap file size from 1 to 4 gigs, it wouldn't boot. So I guess from now on, I'm not letting windows and linux write to the same partition anymore.

kma
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Post by kma » Sun Feb 06, 2005 8:55 am

Thanx, insert looks highly interesting, certainly worth a try!

dago
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Post by dago » Tue Feb 08, 2005 3:56 am

A samsung failed on me a few weeks ago, it was my backup drive :(

As I got a few config files and scripts, I tried to recover it using dd_rescue and dd_rhelp (accompanying script). Both are open-source, linux (unix?) only.

The result wasn't too bad, I could have recovered most un-badblock'ed files.

kma
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Location: Sweden

Post by kma » Thu Feb 17, 2005 1:28 pm

Took quite some time, but using INSERT, dd_rescue and dd_rhelp I managed to recover most of the partition. Could probable have got more... but i found the main thing I was looking for, so didn't have the patience to continue.

Thanks for the suggestions, really helpful tools

miyagi
Posts: 36
Joined: Thu Oct 17, 2002 7:24 pm

Post by miyagi » Thu Feb 17, 2005 8:48 pm

i keep 3-ish month old copies of My Docs & TeamFortress, nothing else is vital. DVD backups are useful.

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