Slashdot Mirror
Data Recovery for the Rest of Us?
Filly-O-Fish asks: "By ironic coincidence, the day the IBM Deskstar Failures story was posted, both my 40 gig 75GXP drives failed. Whilst I don't have the cure for cancer on there, I do have some personal data that I'd really like to try to recover. No way could I afford to have it recovered by a professional data recovery company. I looked at a few software packages, the most promising one being ACR Mediatools, the demo version available only shows you your lost files though, you have to register($499) to actually recover them. Yes, I realize I should have backed them up regularly.. but I haven't had time to back 80 gigs up to CDR, and I can't afford one of these babies. Are there any alternative cheap(!)/free solutions to get my data back?"
my friend lost a drive of mp3's one time and found a util which recovered the partitions, but it didn't support long file names. it was free tho. Just do a google search you should find some utils for free or cheap.
Total hard disk crash - O pestilence!
Now is the winter of our disk contents!
Monday's tape's in a faraway place,
Tuesday's tape is a total disgrace,
Wednesday's tape is full of crap,
Thursday's tape's the one that snapped,
Friday's tape is unforgiving,
Saturday's tape is no longer living,
And the tape that's written on the Sabbath day
Turns out to be the wrong density.
If you want to reconsider a professional data recovery choice, try Drivesavers. I've seen them in various computer publications and they seem to be pretty honest, but I have never used their services so I'm not sure.
Searching C|Net Downloads I found Recover98 which seems to be the best package there. It costs $169 to register, which provides access to all features, and support for Windows 2000 dynamic drives(Software RAID arrays), NTFS 5, and it's really small. Again, I haven't tested it, but it looks decent. The trial has save features partly disabled but you can at least see if it looks good, and it is certainly cheaper than a professional data recovery service.
I haven't had the (mis?)fortune of using an IBM hard drive since my 12.5GB one in an older system of mine. Are there any thoughts of a class-action lawsuit based on the drives' failure to perform properly? If new drives are failing this often, there is a definate problem.
JKoebel
http://www.powerquest.com/easyrestore/
my ibm 75gxp (30 gb) grinded to death and I lost my /home directory as a result =(
Has anyone out there done it with Debug or Norton's Disk Editor? I have a drive with scrambled partition tables that I used a recovery program on and then discovered it might have been Chernobyl infected so now it's worse than when I started and it looks like I'm going to have to copy to another drive in small handfuls of bytes at a time. Any helpful suggestions, dire warnings, etc.?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Try Easyrecovery (don't know the company). I don't know it restores Linux partitions but it recovered my windows-partition perfectly. I only deleted the partition table so it was quite easy to find the FAT. It might be harder after a crash.
I've used Norton Disk Editor to recover deleted files before, but it was a lot of work. First of all, I've only done it for FAT, I suspect it would be just about impossible with NTFS5 given the complexity of the latter.
If you know the path to the file(s) you need and their directory entries are still intact, you can use that to find the first cluster of data... which hopefully hasn't been overwritten yet... And from there, you can walk the FAT chain to get the file back. Otherwise, if the file is a text file, you can search the whole disk for strings in the file and rebuild the thing (create a directory entry for it and write a new chain corresponding to the clusters you find).
You can do this, and for me it was kind of an interesting exercise at first (not that I was happy about having lost so much source code), but... Consider before you start how much time you're going to spend, and how much money you could be making during that time. Automated recovery tools might start to look reasonable.
I think part of the problem was running a second primary partition at the end of the drive and leaving it unhidden.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
There is no really cheap way to go, but . . .
/file/ recovery, and some of the techniques would be applicable here.)
You might get a little more luck if you put the drive in the freezer for a while first (not sure what the IBM problem is). If it is heat related this will buy you a bit of useful time.
If you have some access to the drive but the filesystem is trashed, you can get a lot of data with dd. (This months sysadmin has an article on
Finally, drives are made of parts, and you might be able to replace the bad part. This is pretty easy if it is the drive logic. (a few screws and maybe a little solder)
If it is anything except the platters themselves you can swap the platters with a good drive. (Replacing the heads, which are the most likely culprit.) The big downside here is that you have to trash a good drive (of the EXACT same type) to do this. The resulting drive is NOT to be trusted, or you will find yourself in the same position again very soon (hours or days), since you probably don't have a clean room handy to do the swap. (I suddenly think of "The Manhattan Project" when that HS kid is handling the weapons-grade plutonium with a fish tank and some rubber gloves.)
Good luck (you're gonna need it).
-Peter
I've had good luck in the past with Lost & Found. I don't believe it works with ntfs but I know it works well with fat. It claims to be able to recover from any drive that still spins.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
http://www.2600.org.au/seminars/archive.html
Here is the Audio for a talk by someone that works in a data recovery company.
sumary (from memory)
dd is the go
(but it will usally give up after a number of errors, there are versions to get around this)
In the US apparently they remove the platters and scan the drive using a mageneto force microscope ... but expect to pay big big money for this.
I've got about 300 gigs (soon 700) on my network. Most of that is MP3s and (soon) SHNs. This stuff has all been burnt to CD long in the past, so it's safe, so I don't bother to back it up.
That having been said, get yourself a DDS-2, DDS-3, or DLT drive next time. Back up as much of the important stuff as you can. I'm pretty sure you'll run out of "important" stuff before you run out of even a DDS-2 tape. It's awfully hard for me to find 4 gigs of stuff I absolutely can't live without on my machine.
Good luck in your recovery efforts; hopefully in the future, if you get a decent tape drive, you won't need to worry about it so much.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
While I find it hard to imagine someone actually doing this, the idea of building a fishtank-style clean-room and actually using it for this sort of operation does appeal to me.
I can imagine doing it completely off-the-shelf, by building a working envelope with plexiglas and silicone sealant, hooking up two over-large dish gloves (or surgical gloves) with extended cuffs for mobility, and a HEPA filtration system providing a positive pressure feed. Most of the components could be purchased at Walmart.
Actually using it would be interesting for crazy operations like you outline - last resort efforts of the Nth kind. Makes me wonder if any person or group has actually done such a thing...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I have used drive savers and they were the best. they found every file but 1. (28,000 files).
one thing they told me is that a drive should be regularly defragged, because it makes data recovery simpler.
-michael
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Consider using dd, grep, etc. on a Tom's Root/Boot disk.
-Peter
Are you 100% positive they are 100% dead? A lot of people with the 75 GXP problem found they could get their data off by powering back up the drive. Some ran the IBM utility... Usually it went like this - 1) crash/lots of loud noises, 2) copy data off asap, 3) curse IBM.
I've done a pile of this stuff, drop me a line if you want some more help.
If God gave us curiosity
So I brought the drive into work and ran Ontrack EasyRecovery Pro on it overnight. Somehow it was able to analyze, recover and copy every file on the drive, even those which were written on top of supposedly bad sectors. Unfortunately, EasyRecovery Pro isn't cheap ($500), but it works great.
I still can't get that DDS-2 drive (an ARCHIVE Python something-or-other) to work though, Win2k sees the drive but won't recognize the new tapes I'm feeding it.
But, you've basically got three kinds of problems:
/dev/hd2a see if you can get anything. If you can't, you're screwed unless you can perform a physical repair.
systemic hardware problems (doesn't read, reads only half the bits)
Localized hardware problems (killed or kills some sectors, possibly an increasing number) Possibly causes filesystem problems.
software (filesystem) problems
Now, 1) you really can't recover from, unless it's intermittent 3) doesn't happen by disk failure... if it's 4, you need a utility that grabs what it can, runs, and can get past filesystem errors.
But if your drive is really splattered, it won't work. Try dd
(I spent hours running repair software on a floppy with a big project, to no avail, before a friend ran his direct sector read on it - with no success. He then removed it and pointed out that the metal had separated from the media, and the media wasn't spinning. So, using a toothpick, I superglued them back together, and recovered 97% of my data (but no FATS) )
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot