hard disk crash

>somebody out there who can give me a helping hand to repair
>somehow the hd or point me to a method/way or program to
>rescue at least my holiday-photographs from france i put on
>the hd two hours before the crash...?

The most important thing is to avoid using the disk as much as possible (do not apply power, do not 'spin up' the disk).

Then you need to set up to 'rescue' the data. If you have a second computer with Linux then you're off to a good start. You will need to:

1. determine how large a disk you need to create an image of the partitions on your failed drive. Of course you probably need to go out and buy some storage...

2. set up tools to:
a. copy all readable blocks from the failed drive
b. examine the image for the data you want
The tools in (a) allow you to power up the bad drive and copy whatever is possible with the minimum use of the disk. It is not unusual for a disk to be permanently destroyed during this process or shortly afterwards - no fault of the tools, that's just the general way a disk fails.

For (a) I would suggest 'ddrescue' which acts like 'dd' but skips bad blocks and simply moves on to the next block. This is the behavior you want - you don't want to attempt a retry at this stage because that can make matters worse. After your image recovery operation then you may consider a second image using something like gddrescue to try to get even more data.

For (b) I would suggest 'testdisk'. It is generally used when people accidentally wipe the partition table, but it has good tools for recovering photos.

It is very important that you don't try to hurry things - remember you will be lucky to have 1 shot at recovering data from a bad disk; you need to make absolutely sure that first try goes without a flaw. After setting up, practise using these tools on another disk - maybe a faulty floppy, or even just a good disk. You really don't want to make any mistakes when you get to the real job; especially not with a 'dd'-like tool.

Once you have recovered an image with ddrescue (and maybe a second image with gddrescue) then you can take your time finding other recovery tools to extract even more data. Remember to mark these images 'read only' - you don't want to accidentally write to them.

Am Fri, 31 Aug 2007 23:19:26 +0200
steef schrieb:

> hi you all out there,
>
> one of my hd's crashed completely for unknown reasons. i tried several
> solutions without any result. knoppix 5.0 recognized the partition
> with data (/dev/hda1) but refuses to mount it: 'i could not determine
> the filesystem etc. etc. '
>
[...]

Use "dd_rescue" to copy the contents of the harddisk to an image. Then
you can use this image to try to extract some data. If you use ext2
filesystem you can try e2retrieve, e2salvage and/or e2extract to recover
some data from the damaged partitions.

Peter

--
Peter Greff

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Florian Kulzer wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 23:19:26 +0200, steef wrote:
>
>> hi you all out there,
>>
>> one of my hd's crashed completely for unknown reasons. i tried several
>> solutions without any result. knoppix 5.0 recognized the partition with
>> data (/dev/hda1) but refuses to mount it: 'i could not determine the
>> filesystem etc. etc. '
>>
>
> [...]
>
>
>> somebody out there who can give me a helping hand to repair somehow the hd
>> or point me to a method/way or program to rescue at least my
>> holiday-photographs from france i put on the hd two hours before the
>> crash...?
>>
>
> You can try to repair your partition table with TestDisk and/or to
> recover your photos with PhotoRec; both these tools are available in
> package "testdisk". The "scalpel" package is another option for trying
> to extract the files if you cannot restore the partition table.
>
> In any case it is probably a good idea to create a backup image of the
> whole disk first, as Peter Greff has already suggested.
>
>
thank you all for your response! i combine your advices and try them all
out. i shall let you know the results. thanks again,

steef

drs. steef van duin
publicist/journalist
groningen, holland

--

Hi steef

On Fri, 2007-08-31 at 23:19 +0200, steef wrote:
> somebody out there who can give me a helping hand to repair somehow the
> hd or point me to a method/way or program to rescue at least my
> holiday-photographs from france i put on the hd two hours before the
> crash...?

If the disk is too crapped for you to "repair" or recover some data from
it, you can always try sending it to a data-recovery-specialist.
Some of them offer to scan the disk for free, tell you what and how much
of it they will be able to recover and how much it will cost you.
I haven't done any market-research lately but the obvious downside to
the Do-it-yourself-approach is the price. You will probably have to
expect a bill ranging up from 600-700 to 1200-1400 Euros...

Cheers

Michael

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