On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 08:02:07PM -0700, linux guy wrote:
Is there any way to sniff out the old partition table ? What would I need other than the partition table sizes ? I know I had boot, swap and / partitions...
FYI:
A year or so ago I had a USB HD with 200-300 gigs of irreplaceable data on it, formatted as (iirc) ext3. then I accidentally (some might say "stupidly") did a DOS format on the drive. MAJOR OOPS.
I tried some free tools to recover files, and didn't find them very helpful (one of 'em saved bazillions of files with no useful filenames).
googling around I found a company doing business in INdia selling software that will recover windows/dos/mac/linux filesystems, and can run on windows or linux. not finding anything else promising, I sprung for the 50 bucks.
the software is somewhat flaky, isn't necessarily trivial to use, some of the options don't work in intuitive ways. but to shorten this long story, I managed to recover pretty much everything that was on the drive, after banging on it for a few days.
I had some questions about how to use the software that I sent via email to their support email address, a couple of times, and have yet to receive any response from them, so it's clearly a case of caveat emptor.
As best as I can remember, it was called "Recover Data for Linux".
So, if you've got a hosed partition table, you may be in a similar position to what I was in, so maybe, just maybe, it would be helpful for you.
YMMV! I'm not providing any warranties.
Is there any way to copy (and possibly recover) the raw data from the drive ? Possibly using dd or something ?
I tried using partimage, but as you guys know, if there is no partition (partition table), it can't copy it.
What are the chances that if I could recover the partition table that the data would still be there ?
Aside: this caught me TOTALLY off guard. SMART was enabled for this drive, the drive was checked periodically, etc. This laptop hadn't moved off my desk in months and was basically only rebooted to run newer kernels.
I did my last backup about a month ago. I have a backup of all my emails, so that is good. All my digital images are stored on a separate drive, so none of them were lost. I'm trying to figure out what content I added in the last month... documents, etc, that got stored in /home/me. I shudder at the thought of sorting this all out. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org