Trying to recover my crashed hard rive.

lilzz · 08-11-2016, 04:54 PM

i crashed my hard drive and it cannot boot anymore.
My hard drive is dual boot linux/window
So, I use Ubuntu Live CD to boot and I go into that.
Then I sudo fdisk -1

which one is my lost Linux drive? /dev/sda5?

I want save my files.
What do I do next?

linosaurusroot · 08-11-2016, 05:40 PM

Unless the partition table you show is damaged sda5 is your linux partition. Can you mount it under your live CD and use a backup method like dump to a remote machine?

lilzz · 08-12-2016, 06:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by linosaurusroot

Unless the partition table you show is damaged sda5 is your linux partition. Can you mount it under your live CD and use a backup method like dump to a remote machine?

My hard drive is crashed, therefore
if I do
sudo mkdir my_file
sudo mount /dev/sda5 /my_file

After a long long while, it says : mount point /my_file does not exist.

I check, the /my_file folder exists. remember, my hard drive has crashed.

rknichols · 08-12-2016, 10:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lilzz

My hard drive is crashed, therefore
if I do
sudo mkdir my_file
sudo mount /dev/sda5 /my_file

After a long long while, it says : mount point /my_file does not exist.

Unless you are currently in the system root directory ("/"), "my_file" and "/my_file" are not the same thing.

lilzz · 08-12-2016, 12:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rknichols

Unless you are currently in the system root directory ("/"), "my_file" and "/my_file" are not the same thing.

OK, I modified
mkdir my_file
pwd
/home/ubuntu

sudo mount /dev/sda5 /home/ubuntu/my_file

Now it says mount: /dev/sda5: can't read superblock

my hard drive has crashed. How to recover the data inside?

Habitual · 08-12-2016, 12:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lilzz

i crashed my hard drive and it cannot boot anymore.

How, exactly did this event occur?

lilzz · 08-12-2016, 01:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Habitual

How, exactly did this event occur?

The computer got frozen and unresponsive I had no choice but to press the power button and then that happened.

Emerson · 08-12-2016, 01:18 PM

Try a "dry run" of fsck on this filesystem, see what it tells you.

Habitual · 08-12-2016, 03:16 PM

don't know. Sorry.
Frozen, and power cycle during an install or upgrade usually necessitates a re-install of the OS.

lilzz · 08-13-2016, 11:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emerson

Try a "dry run" of fsck on this filesystem, see what it tells you.

I did sudo fsck /dev/sda5
but it says back.ext2: attempts to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sda5.
Could this be a zero length partition?
±++±+++++++++++++++++±+++++++++++++++++++++++

So from above, is my Linux partition cannot be recovered? or the system still can't find it?

smallpond · 08-13-2016, 12:06 PM

"short read" means the read stopped on a bad block. Make a backup of the data using dd commands to skip any unreadable parts, then repair by forcing a write of the bad block(s), which will cause the disk to relocate them to spare areas. After that run fsck to recover your filesystem. ext2 has redundant superblocks, so it should be possible to recover some of the data.

Emerson · 08-13-2016, 12:27 PM

Use of ddrescue should be preferred over dd.

lilzz · 08-13-2016, 07:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emerson

Use of ddrescue should be preferred over dd.

I do not have ddrescue in my system but have badblocks
Can I use that instead but that's very slow.

Emerson · 08-13-2016, 07:25 PM

This is why SystemRescueCD was invented.

lilzz · 08-13-2016, 07:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by smallpond

"short read" means the read stopped on a bad block. Make a backup of the data using dd commands to skip any unreadable parts, then repair by forcing a write of the bad block(s), which will cause the disk to relocate them to spare areas. After that run fsck to recover your filesystem. ext2 has redundant superblocks, so it should be possible to recover some of the data.

How do I use that?
dd if=/dev/sda5 of=my_file.img?
Then fsck my_file.img?