Failed HD

[byrdman]

So I have an external 100GB HD that just recently failed me. Thinking I had last years turbotax file on there, I am anxious to get the data off of there. The steps I have taken sofar is to run

Code: Select all

ddrescue -n /dev/broken /media/WorkingHD/recovered.img /home/me/recovery.log

After that I ran

Code: Select all

ddrescue -r 1 /dev/broken /media/workingHD/recovered.img /home/me/recovery.log

This is what I was understood to do from the ddrescue page from http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue

So now I have a 100GB .img file and don't know how to read it. tried mounting it with -o loop but it says wrong filesystem.

Does anyone know if I can read this?
Or more importantly, does anyone know how to recover/read/fix a failed HD? I just need some files off of it...

[Basher52]

I haven't tried this but I read about it once.

http://linux.die.net/man/1/foremost

To run formost on an image

sudo foremost -i image -o /recovery/foremost

As far as I've understood it, the /recovery/foremost directory should then hold the files that can be read from the image.

Lemme know how it goes... in case I need it some day


Oh and I found this too in case you missed that:
http://wiki.edseek.com/guide:mount_loopback

[byrdman]

Thanks Basher. I will try that. I also found http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
This didn't work well when I tried it on a windoze machine but on my F16 box, it has been running for almost 48 hours and it IS recovering files. The problem with it, is it will name the files some alpha-numeric number instead of the original filename - which it mainly does for pix and multimedia files. So for example my picture called "Photo of kids being born".jpg is now called f4434425.jpg. I am not complaining, one, because I had all my photos backed up on my hosted storage, and two, I am in a better situation with the recovered rename files then I was 49 hours ago!
What I liked about the testdisk and photorec was that it said there was not a readable partition and it was a blank, unrecognizable disk.(In windows7) & dmesg reported I/O errors when I plugged it in, although it was assigning it to /dev/sdg.

Seems like a handy tool to have around for any IT consultants/recovery/forensics type people out there.

[Basher52]

windoze(or winblows as I call it) can never ever handle a disk it can't read normally.
When I got bad disks at work I tell them that winblows can't handle it and then I mount the disk in Linux and do the things I need from there.

Hope it all works out for ya