Need help with backing up hard drive!

JohnDoe13 · 11-16-2006, 09:29 PM

My computer died so I bought my hard drive to a store for hoping they could retrieve the data on the drive but they weren't able to and this is what the store said:

Quote:

We put your hard drive into a Linux boot machine and attempted to access your data. We were unable to mount the drive and upon further investigation we have found that the partition is completely corrupt.

Our Linux OS sees the drive partition as an unknown and unformatted partition.

This makes it pretty much impossible for us to do any work, as any partition recovery software we run is only compatible with FAT and NTFS file systems.

My computer was running on FC5 when it died. Is there any hope to get my data from the hard drives?

Tinkster · 11-17-2006, 12:51 AM

Depends on what happened to it, and where the fault lies. There are
tools that will try to find data on the raw device...

Do a search here, there's several threads to that effect.

Cheers,
Tink

mickyg · 11-17-2006, 02:57 AM

I believe Knoppix-STD has tools that might be able to help. I know it has tools to search for file formats, such as jpg, but having never used it I don't know how effective it is. Plus, I think it's designed to work with a disk image, so you'll probably need a second hd to store the disk image on to work on.

asquante · 11-17-2006, 03:30 AM

Try using Acronis Disk Director trial. I think it could restore ext2 / 3 partitions.

What partition type was it you had? i believe there are some restore programs built into the different *progs packages.

mARGO

jschiwal · 11-17-2006, 03:46 AM

There is a spinrite program that will work on the disk itself and might be able to repair it.
http://spinrite.info/

pixellany · 11-17-2006, 07:24 AM

How exactly did the computer die? Depending on what happened, it is not obvious that anything will be wrong with the disk.

I would not place a lot of stock in the average computer store knowing anything about Linux partitions and file systems. It IS interesting that they had a Linux box at all. (Name of store??)

The first thing to do is to get this drive into another working computer and clone it. Then you can set about how best to recover the data.

matthewg42 · 11-17-2006, 08:27 AM

Through a rather embarrassing incident with a very annoying Toshiba system recovery CD, I managed to corrupt the partition table on one of my machines. I used the PLD Linux Rescue CD to run testdisk. This program looked over the disk and re-constructed the partition table for me, fixing my machine.

Long live PLD!

Oh, and death to "recovery" disks which partition and [start to] format drives without ANY interaction. Not so much as an "are you sure?"...