Recovering a hard drive using linux
 

Hey guys
i have a hard drive which has crashed and i hear you can use linux as a FTP server and extract sectors off of it to reclaim some of the lost data. how would i go about this ?
let me know
thanks

I don't know about using Linux as an FTP server but you might be able to access the hard drive by booting a live CD. These are listed on http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php.

Live CDs boot entirely from the CD-rom and leave the hard drive totally intact,

Something like Knoppix or Kanotix will probably do the trick.

Re:
 

So,
as a live disk you can see your hard drive ? and if so what folders (steps) would i need to take in order to get those files out ...i'm assuming once you find them you can either e-mail them or save them to CD rom no ? i'm a newbie as the forum implies so any help would be appreciated

A Live CD is basically a complete Linux system that runs entirely off a bootable CD, and will not affect any data that's on the hard drive. Live CD's are excellent tools to let people get a taste of running Linux, but without having to actually install it. A Live CD will not write any data to your hard drive, and so you can pop in the CD and be running Linux, then go back to your regular operating system by just removing the CD.

So, as a very basic description, if you wish to try to recover data from a faulty disk drive, one thing you could try would be to boot up a Live CD (such as Knoppix), then copy important files to a USB pendrive (for example). Obviously if your hard drive is failing then that may likely affect your ability to recover specific files. Along those lines there is a popular utility called foremost that can be very helpful in a data recovery operation

Lastly, I would point out that the only files you really would need to recover would be in your /home directory. There's no point in spending the time trying to recover any system files because they can be restored by simply reinstalling your distro. Good luck with it

kanotix livecd can burn cd-r's using k3b, if you have 2 optical drives (one for the kanotix cd and one to burn with) so you can put you important files on a burned cd if you don't have a usb stick sitting around.

or if you are lucky enough to already be running kanotix on another working computer, and the computer with the faulty hd can still kind of run, and you had the foresight to install ssh on it, you can start the ssh server by typing "/etc/init.d/ssh start" and then on your working computer, using krusader, into the address bar type: "fish://root@<faulty computer's ip address>" and just drag the files over to your good drive.

that makes a lot of assumptions though.

then there's always the "take out the hard drive and attach it to another computer" method, which might actually be easier.

Re:
 

:jawa: Well this is for a friends computer it's mostly his music files totalling more than 180 gigs and 4 years worth of created music so cd roms would be tedious at best. i told him to put his drive as slave and use berry linux off the cd rom (btw i love berry linux) then just use a 10/100 cable and transfer the files through a network to another computer i haven't heard back from him so i'm assuming it worked. I also gave him the link for Formost so between the two hopefully something positive came from it.
thanks for all the help guys any other ideas would be great just in case.
this is a great website!