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Mailing Lists: lists.debian.org > debian-user > 07 > 086858.html (Request Expert lists.debian.org Support)

hard disk crash

From: pinniped <cirilo_bernardo(at)yahoo.com>
Date: Fri Aug 31 2007 - 19:17:39 EDT

>somebody out there who can give me a helping hand to repair
>somehow the hd or point me to a method/way or program to
>rescue at least my holiday-photographs from france i put on
>the hd two hours before the crash...?

The most important thing is to avoid using the disk as much as possible (do not apply power, do not 'spin up' the disk).

Then you need to set up to 'rescue' the data. If you have a second computer with Linux then you're off to a good start. You will need to:

  1. determine how large a disk you need to create an image of the partitions on your failed drive. Of course you probably need to go out and buy some storage...
  2. set up tools to:
  3. copy all readable blocks from the failed drive
  4. examine the image for the data you want The tools in (a) allow you to power up the bad drive and copy whatever is possible with the minimum use of the disk. It is not unusual for a disk to be permanently destroyed during this process or shortly afterwards - no fault of the tools, that's just the general way a disk fails.

For (a) I would suggest 'ddrescue' which acts like 'dd' but skips bad blocks and simply moves on to the next block. This is the behavior you want - you don't want to attempt a retry at this stage because that can make matters worse. After your image recovery operation then you may consider a second image using something like gddrescue to try to get even more data.

For (b) I would suggest 'testdisk'. It is generally used when people accidentally wipe the partition table, but it has good tools for recovering photos.

It is very important that you don't try to hurry things - remember you will be lucky to have 1 shot at recovering data from a bad disk; you need to make absolutely sure that first try goes without a flaw. After setting up, practise using these tools on another disk - maybe a faulty floppy, or even just a good disk. You really don't want to make any mistakes when you get to the real job; especially not with a 'dd'-like tool.

Once you have recovered an image with ddrescue (and maybe a second image with gddrescue) then you can take your time finding other recovery tools to extract even more data. Remember to mark these images 'read only' - you don't want to accidentally write to them. 

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Received on Fri Aug 31 19:33:21 2007
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