Hi All,

I had a hard drive stop booting on me. The hard drive still runs, but I think it is missing some kind of "header" information so it won't boot. I have a new hard drive with a new Linux Mint installed, so I'm not ready to try and get the important data off my old hard drive. It isn't mission critical data, but it would be nice to have.

My first effort is to get access to my Thunderbird e-mail file(s) so I can use them (or it) as the basis for a new Thunderbird install. After a brief search, it appears that there is no file extension for these files.

Can PhotoRec find and copy Thunderbird e-mail files without an extension?

If so, can you point me to a tutorial that explains how to do it if the search isn't trivially explained?

If not, do you have any other recommendations?

TIA...

PS - My next project is to programmatically back-up key files to an external drive. Once bit, twice shy.

1st thing to try would be testdisk, which might get partitions.

Photorec gets you data, but divorced from file names. Not a great prospect.

There's also extundelete, which last seen was a hopeful version 0.2.4. It will hardly hurt to try it or something similar.

How about your backup?