[lug] Data recovery

[Gary Hodges]

On 03/23/2011 07:13 PM, Aaron Nichols wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 3:30 PM, Gary Hodges<Gary.Hodges at noaa.gov>  wrote:
>> Thanks for that suggestion.  It gives some tantalizing information, but
>> ultimately it doesn't seem capable of fixing the partitions.  I now have
>> hope that the files I want can be recovered.  The utility "knows" about
>> the partition I want:
>>    EXT4 Large file Sparse superblock Recover, 46 GB / 43 GiB
>> but I'm ultimately left with a "partition can't be recovered" message.
>
> Yes, I've had disks it couldn't recover but it was worth a shot. There
> are some docs about how you can fiddle with disk geometry to try to
> get it to work - not sure if that's worthwhile. The same group makes
> PhotoRec which is a filesystem independent (mostly) image recovery
> app. It's intended for recovering images from damaged disks and goes
> after the image data itself without requiring an intact filesystem. It
> may be more appropriate since you're after images on the disk. I don't
> have any experience with this app though.
>
> http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Thanks Aaron.  I didn't realize that photorec was part of the testdisk 
install.  I just finished running it on my image file and it found a 
bunch of files.

-------------------
Disk mini9.img - 61 GB / 57 GiB (RO)
      Partition            Start        End    Size in sectors
      No partition       0   0  1  7493  52 63  120378384 [Whole disk]

176736 files saved in /z/hodges/Orbit/recup_dir directory.
Recovery completed.
txt: 116579 recovered
elf: 13608 recovered
png: 10796 recovered
exe: 9544 recovered
tx?: 8811 recovered
gz: 5009 recovered
jpg: 4751 recovered
gif: 1522 recovered
tar: 1390 recovered
mp3: 870 recovered
others: 3856 recovered
-------------------

So it found 4751 .jpg files, which I'm pretty happy about.  Initial 
scans indicate a lot of dups, and they are all scrambled.  By scrambled 
I mean there doesn't seem to be any organization of the recovered files. 
  On balance though, it is good to have what I have.

If anyone knows of a similar recovery tool that might preserve some 
directory structure, I'd like to give it shot.