On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 1:44 PM, Rene de Haas <[email protected]> wrote:
> Given that it was linux partition it's probably not going to be ntfs, but
> ext2, or newer. For linux file systems there are less options. If there is
> nothing physically wrong with the drive, you could try mounting it to a
> running linux system like someone else suggested.
The best course of action depends on what's wrong.
If it's a major hardware failure (e.g., head crash), unplug the the
thing ASAP and don't fool with it again. Get it off to the data
recovery house. Major failures often involve bits and pieces getting
into places they shouldn't, and the more you run the drive the worse
it gets.
If the drive seems mostly okay, but has some bad blocks, and you
want to try a cheap option, there is a free *nix tool called
"dd_rhelp" that comes in very handy. It aims to read all blocks on
the disk, but it starts with the easy blocks first, and then
repeatedly retries on the failing blocks. After many retries you
might get a good read. (This is one of the big things SpinRite does,
but it does it without Steve Gibson talking about how awesome he is,
which is nice.)
If the drive is functioning fine but there is logical corruption
(i.e., some partition or filesystem metadata structures on disk are
scrambled), then the first thing I would do is get a full binary image
of the drive, including unused blocks. The traditional *nix tool "dd"
is fine for this. Once you've got the image, shut down the original
drive and do your recovery attempts on the image (or copies of the
image -- keep the original read-only). This way, if you find the
non-invasive methods don't work, you still have the original to send
off to the data recovery house.
There are a variety of tools one can try when attempting logical
corruption, depending on the nature. gpart ("guess partitions", not
to be confused with gparted) and e2fsck are good starting points.
-- Ben
~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~
~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
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