On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 16:38 +0100, Mick wrote: > On Thursday 17 May 2007 15:45, Dan Farrell wrote: > > On Thu, 17 May 2007 12:36:25 +0100 > > > > Mick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > > I tried to dd the boot sector so that I can look at it on my hard > > > drive, but it cannot access /dev/sda. Is there anything that I can > > > do with my Gentoo to recover the files on this USB? > > > > have you tried reading raw from the device like > > > > | dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.image > > > > ? That might do the recovery. How to get it out of the image is the > > same problem but once the backup succeeds you can plug it into a > > windows xp box and reformat, and you will probably end up with the same > > partition structure as originally. Then you can try to read the right > > part of the image out of the image, once you get the numbers from fdisk > > on the newly formatted drive, and end up with an image of sda1. From > > there you should be able to mount sda1 and read out the data, if it > > isn't corrupted. > > Thanks Dan, as I said above I tried to extract the MBR out of it by running: > > dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/r1 bs=512 > > But couldn't access it whatsoever. > > > I also am wondering what happened to the partition table. I bet your > > coworker has a security-compromised box at home (oh, runs windows? > > right...) At any rate, if the data is recoverable, it may be possible > > to rebuild the partition table if you can find out where the partition > > started and ended. People have done it before, i've read online about > > it. >
Have you tried examining it physically? I've had a drive behave similarly before, and it turned out to be an issue with one of the solder joints on the crystal only having intermittent contact ( was almost a dry join) - resoldering solved it and let me recover the data -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
