Situation Normal, All Fuc*ed Up

Ok folks,

here's the situation; I have a (full) 20 GB Harddrive that has recently decided that it no longer wishes to participate in my daily computer related activities. Specifically, there is a physical problem with the drive. The drive is unable to be mounted, read, or respond to obseneties... When the drive spins up, there is a wierd and obviously unhealthy clicking sound coming from it.

Now, this drive is completley full of valuable data, which I desperatly need to retrieve. After trying various recovery techniques with no success, I had this idea while in a state of rage induced intoxication; "Hey, maybe the entire drive is not destroyed, but only the first few megs. Maybe I can forceably retrieve the rest of the data...". So while still intoxicated with a combination of rage, hatred, Indonesion clove cigarettes, and chocolate, I decided use the linux dd command to try and retrieve my data.

Stats on drive:
IBM Deskstar DPTA-372050
20 GB
about 2 years old.
Partitions:
0) 8 meg unused partion on begining of drive for some reason (thanks ms format )
1) 20 gb (FAT32) partition of all my data.

Here is what I did:
I typed the following command in an attempt to force the drive to read all my data, and save it to one giant 20gb image file.

"dd if=/dev/hdf5 of=/mnt/g/e_drive.img bs=1k conv=noerror"

After several tries, my theory was confirmed. Only this first 10 - 15 megs for the drive are unwilling to play nice. Once dd got past these first few megs, the copy went fine. Unfortunatly the copy stopped at 2 GB due to lack of large file support in linux.

After a few hours of screaming and hacking at my kernel, and compiling, I managed to fix the large file support issue. So now I have a nice 20 GB image of my broken drive.

Now in theory, the following should have worked:
"mount -t vfat -o loop /mnt/g/e_drive.img /mnt/e"

Naturally this did not work. I get that good old "wrong fs, bad superblock, etc" error message from mount.

Now if my thought process is semi-logical, one would think that all my data still exists in this 20 gb file taking up space on one of my other harddrives (that's doomed to fail after I fix this one...). So basically my problem is, how do I get this data and reintegrate it into the cooperative hdd community ? Are there any programs available that anyone knows of that would allow me to maybe read whats in this giant file ? Any IDEAS are most welcome.

Please keep a few things in mind:
1) I am poor. I cannot afford to take this drive to a recovery shop
2) See (1): add I cannot buy any sort of recovery software.
3) If I can't get this data from my HDD, I will probably retreat to the far recesses of my mind, and commit myself to living on the subway tracks and outside gov't buildings yelling at my socks about the evils of technology and preach salvation by way of planting tomatos in the amazon.

To end I quote the words of a great thinker:
"In Central park, Perri the squirrel is beginning to hunt for the day's food. A French poodle, held on a leash by a mink-coated lady, barks at him, and he runs three times around a tree."
-R.A.W

-SpookMonkey

Nobody has any ideas at all ?

-SpookMonkey

I have used a program called Drive Rescue which I have from a magazine which is very good and perhaps you could ask around to see if anyone has a copy. It basically scans the disk for any and all info that is coherent and enables you to rebuild the info on another disk. You might also do a search for recovery stuff as I found a lot of free stuff recently when I had an accident with my refrigeration cooling and got condensation in the socket. The system went into an auto defrag in Windblows and corrupted both hard drives. I could not face the task of spending weeks rebuilding my M$ system and went to Debian.

I have no clue as to whether FAT32 saves alternate superblocks like ext2. And without a valid superblock (if there is one), all that file is is a chunk of data, without boundaries. Assuming it did, I'd think you may have to physically lay it over the region of the file that mount assumes it would find one.

I know I'm not offering much help, but hopefully someone else who may have a good understanding of FAT32 maybe able to help you on this one.

No luck so far.

Tried a program called R-Studio. Thought I managed to save some of my files. Unfortunatly they are all corrupt.
I am at a loss here folks.

If only the linux gods would smile upon me and show me a way...

-SpookMonkey

I think R-Studio is commercial is it not? They give away a 'free' 'trial' version which basically tells you your disk is stuffed and offers you the ability to recover something like 64 meg of it... or some such drivel.

I too went through a similar hard drive expiration and I too went looking for recovery tools, but came to the conclusion that there are simply no good 'free' tools out there that will do it.

Quite a few commercial ones, but unlike the poor poster my stuff wasn't that important, and certainly not important enough to warrant me paying 400-4000 pounds on a recovery operation.... Fortunately I had backups

I think unless you're willing to get medieval with a hex editor (I tried this too) you're stuffed. And even armed with the tools (I found a 'how to recover files on Linux) tutorial, it's exceptionally difficult, even more so when you no longer have a functioning drive (mine was dying gradually - I had bad blocks and whatnot, but the physical drive was still - barely - operational).

*sigh* I wish you luck with your planting. I'll bring over some nitrogen fertilizer and help you out next time I encounter similar troubles.

Slick.

Yes R-Studio is commercial. buddy of mine bought it a while back.
But even with that proggie I've had no luck. Just recieved a pack of 200 blank cd's from a friend today. Maybe such a disaster can be avoided in the future.

I've considered playing with a hex editor on my nice 20 gig file, but unfortunatley I have neither the time nor the patience for such an undertaking.

Ah well, on the bright side, there is a whole 20 gigs that I don't have to burn now.

-SpookMonkey

don't delete it yet... open it in a hex editor, look for the 7th sector or so which begins with "ëX�MSWIN4.1" (or 0xEB 58 90 4D 53 57 49 4E 34 2E 31), copy 512 bytes beginning with the 'ë' to the first sector. there's your backup superblock --restored. then try mounting again... i nuked a 40GB fat32 partition once, when WinXP said, "This drive is not formatted. Would you like to format it now?" and immediately restored it that way. came right back, no reboot even

There is another program called "easyrecovery" that has saved my keister in the past. Take a look around for a demo of it.
Website should be:

www.ontrack.com

i had good sucess with GetDataBack... and i use DiskExplorer frequently as an absolute sector editor/viewer
Runtime Software

they can both work with raw filesystem images, too