Hi Walter,
Data recovery is one of the tasks we undertake at work on a fairly regular
basis although normally with NTFS file systems. We use Active Partition
Recovery, Active File Recovery and Zero Assumption Recovery depending on the
circumstances and have a very good level of success with these tools.
There is however a fair bit of donkey work to do after the recovery to
identify the valid files but this is often worth it if the data is important
so I would suggest you give one of these a try. Active File Recovery is the
most likely to give favorable results and the latest version supports ext2
and ext3 partitions and does attempt to recognize the file types for you. It
is also a non-destructive tool so if it doesn't work you can still try
something else.
Jon
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Adrian Warman" <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 10:37 AM
To: "Dorset Linux User Group" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Dorset] Recover
Realistically, you should prepare yourself for not getting the data back.
While that seems harsh, I'd rather be pessimistic and then you have a
degree of success than for you to get your hopes up too soon.
Also, I'm not offering any promises or guarantees of anything.
However...
Your email doesn't give many details (for example, I'm not clear whether
the drive had a Linux filesystem on it - if it does, why refer to D:? Was
it encrypted? And so on. ) This makes it hard to comment on specifics.
Here are a couple of articles that might be helpful:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=97356
http://blog.edseek.com/archives/2004/02/25/ext3-filesystem-bad-superblock-recovery/
Other searches suggest that the photorec tool might help; I haven't used
it
myself.
I would *strongly* recommend taking *plenty* of time to explore, think
through - and ideally practice on a separate drive - the various recovery
options. Taking this extra time won't make your challenge worse. Rushing
into a quick attempt at a fix could easily obliterate whatever data might
be left.
Give serious thought to buying a large external drive and copying an image
of your affected drive onto it (using the dd command is - painful but
true
- one way to do it). When you have the image - or ideally several copies -
you can try out some recovery techniques on the copies, in the hope of
finding one that works.
Consider if it's worth paying for a professional recovery service. It'll
cost little to ask, although the service itself probably wouldn't be
cheap.
Specialist professionals take years to acquire the necessary skills and
tools for this kind of task. It's not easy. Take your time, do plenty of
research and preparation, to try and maximize the chance of success.
Before each and every step you plan, every command you enter, ensure you
check and verify *exactly* what you intend, that the command will do that
and nothing else. Get someone to help you check.
Do some reading around the subject of computer forensics; the tools and
techniques are for problems that are very similar to what you describe.
Best wishes for a good outcome.
Adrian
On Sep 18, 2012 8:36 PM, "Walter" <[email protected]> wrote:
OK, hands up, I done the unforgivable!
I downloaded the Beta Ubuntu 12.10 and tried to write to a usb stick
using 'Startup Disk Creator' which previously worked very well
particularly
with Ubuntu (but not always others). This time it would not acknowledge
the
.iso, after a google I copied a recommendation to use DD command. DD
IF=blaa blaa blaa OF =dah di dah. Proceeded to get the input file IF
correct, but yes, forgot about the output file! You might have guessed I
wrote the the D drive 500GB (sdb) and not the usb stick (sdc).
Don't laugh I bet you have all done it!
What recommendations do you have for a rescue program to get as much of
my
data back as possible?
Walter
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