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USB Drives — Recovery?

Posted by kdawson on from the just-for-the-flash-of-it dept.

pipingguy writes "Now that 'thumb drives' are so inexpensive (a 1-GB SD card with USB housing/adapter costs about $25), which programs does Slashdot recommend for system recovery? What is the need-to-have software? Additionally, I'd like to get some input on the durability of the newish card reader / adapter devices, as some of them seem to be pretty flimsy (but very useful/flexible as opposed to the old fixed-capacity NAND devices)."

4 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Distrowatch by Almahtar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Distrowatch is a great place to find forensics/recovery distrobutions. When I have to recover a system (be it Windows, Mac, or Linux) I've found that pretty much any Linux liveCD or USB forensics distro will do the trick. From editing/fixing partitions to recovering data from a dead OS to fixing a botched install of an OS the tools are all there.

    1. Re:Distrowatch by Almahtar · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Oh and on a side note they're great for anonymous use of computers that normally require you to authenticate, provided you have physical access to them. Most network admins don't think of the possibility of bootable USB volumes and thus don't disable it in BIOS. On top of that, most BIOS manufacturers don't think people need an option for disabling booting from a USB disk and don't provide it. Don't have a valid account in this lab but need to check your e-mail? Plug in your USB disk, power down the computer, boot into your USB Linux install, check your mail, and reboot back to normal operation.

  2. Re:photorec by Richard+W.M.+Jones · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I will second this. Photorec is excellent - it saved my bacon when my brother-in-law stuck his camera memory card into my computer and the card was accidentally formatted.

    However I have seen other failure modes in memory cards where somehow the card "loses" all the sectors. Linux reports the device as being 0 bytes long. I don't know of any software which can recover from that sort of an error. Please let me know if there is some because I have one card which does just that.

    Rich.

    --
    libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
  3. Re:the same ones you used before... by pipingguy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My question was based on the fact that these drives are so cheap and large now that you can actually fit a Linux distribution on it, plus a lot of other stuff for thirty bucks. Yes, I have seen the past related Slashdot stories, but the concept of swapping-out SD cards with a thumb drive-sized adapter is new to me.

    Or are you claiming that technology stands still and therefore "read the FAQ, luser"?