Data recovery

[Jeff Silverman]

On Sun, 12 Jan 2003, Jen Barrick wrote:

> So a month or two ago, the primary hard drive on my Unix machine went
> poof.  Like hard-drive-now-makes-clicky-noises sort of poof.  It had been
> running RedHat 7.2, with several different partitions scattered around on
> the drive.  There wasn't any dreadfully important data on the drive, with
> the exception of all of my backed up email since 1997 sitting like a duck
> in my home directory... which happened to be on the partition that went
> poo.  I'd really really like that information back. :/
> 
> My long suffering roommate helped me try to get a disk image of that
> partition off the drive onto our OpenBSD router box, using dd, but then we
> ran into errors (he can chime in with what exaectly they were if he
> remembers...  Brandon?  It's been a little while and I've forgotten).  I
> feel kind of bad about continuing to bug him about it, so I'm thinking I
> might appeal to you all and get suggestions on how to proceed.
> 
> It's been so long since we tried the image-over-to-BSD thing that I'm
> thinking I want to just start from the top.  So, anyone have suggestions
> on how to recover data from an IDE drive, formatted ext2 and running RH
> 7.2, that only works without bad noises if it's very very cool and then
> for only about 10 minutes? :/
> 
> -Jen
> 
> 
Depending on what else is wrong with the drive, it might not be strictly 
necessary to fsck the drive.  Don't mount the drive, just dd the partition 
on to another partition of a known good drive.  For example, if your bad 
drive is the slave on the secondary IDE bus, and your data is in the 6th 
partition, and your known good drive is the master on the secondary bus 
and your destination partition is the second partition, then the command

dd if=/dev/hdd6 of=/dev/hdc2

should do it.  Then, try mounting /dev/hdc2 readonly and see what data you 
can get off of it.


I offer no guarantees, but I have tried it and it worked tolerably well.



Jeff



-- 
Jeff Silverman, 
Senior Computing Specialist 3, Fire and Environmental Research Applications (FERA) team.
jeffs at duet.cfr.washington.edu   (206) 732-7815
http://duet.cfr.washington.edu