An update to the tale of woe about my external hard disc from other a month ago. I purchased a 250GB disc during the week and installed it and the problematic drive in my OpenBSD machine at home. I then used dd_rescue (I could also have used dd but dd_rescue is designed to be fault tolerant) to copy the data from the troubled drive to the new one. It was about 50% done when I checked on it this morning so it should be almost fully done when I get home after work. There hasn’t been any read errors so far which confirms my suspicions that the only problem with the drive was that the partition table had become corrupt.
So now I have, or will very shortly have, a 200GB file containing the contents of my old external disc. What are my options for recovering my data from that?
I should probably mention that in the past month+ since my drive failed the prospect of losing all that data has really gotten me down, add to that the knowledge that the recovery was bound to be arduous with no guarantee of success.
In a related incident I accidentally deleted a directory of songs and other material I’d been working on that I stored on my Desktop (stupid!) because I had no where else to store or back them up do.. Some of the songs I was really enthusiastic about. Losing them, including an almost finished remix I’d worked on for several man-days, was a major bummer and fed my ill feeling.
Increasingly, and especially for people like me, data loss is a major issue. Most of everything I do, generates or otherwise produces data. I am the sum of my bits.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html
looks like it might be what you want.
Otherwise hardware guy where I work has offered to have a look but he’ll need the actual physical disk.
What do you reckon he’d try and how could I get the disc to him?
I’m pulling down a load of live-discs now again (I misplaced the discs from last time) so I can have a look at the image I’ve taken with some of the provided tools.
I tried TestDisk before with no luck.
Doh, didn’t realise you had tried testdisk.
Not sure what he would try but he has a bunch of professional products he uses to do data recovery for customers.
As for getting the disk to him, if you drop it over to the gaff some evening I’ll bring it into work and he can have a look next time he’s in the office.
Did you try the full TestDisk scan? Cause after a bit of a google it looked like the best bet to me.
Otherwise if you knew what the partition sizes were and the disk geometry, cylinders and all that of the disk you should be able to figure out what the partition table should be…
If I was to lose my hard disk now, it would be catastrophic. And I don’t even keep backups.
I’m going to try TestDisk again and Partition Table Doctor when the current `gpart` scan is done (it’s taking quite a while).
you are not your GarageBand mixes. You are not your digital photos. You are not your del.icio.us backup.