I have a 200GB external USB/FireWire HDD with a large FAT32 partition and a smaller HFS+ partition. Unfortunately these partitions no longer mount for me on my Mac or a PC so I think it’s time for me to consider disaster recovery options. I’ve investigated the “Ultimate Boot CD” but it doesn’t appear to support external USB hard drives. A similar project, “UBCD for Windows” does have this support but requires a copy of Windows XP to run, that’s something I don’t have.
When I connect to drive to a Windows 2000 machine and open the “Volume Manager” I can see the entire drive displayed as “unallocated space”. I know, or have a feeling, that the files are on there, my suspicion is that the partition table is, to use a technical term, messed up.
I’ve taken the drive out of the caddy and mounted using an IDE ribbon in a PC. The OS, Knoppix, sees the drive but no partitions. Neither gpart nor parted can see any partition information on the drive. So, that’s definitely the problem - a corrupt partition table. Doesn’t look like I’ll be able to fix that.
Ran some Western Digital, the drive’s manufacturer, test utilities off the Ultimate Boot CD and confirmed that the drive is healthy, at least that’s something.
So my current plan is as follows:
Mount the drive in a PC at home along with an unused 20GB drive and use dd to copy blocks totaling in size less than 20GB from the 200 to the 20 and then use a disaster recovery or forensics tool to attempt recovery of files. Lather, rinse, repeat. The two tools most suited for this job are sleuthkit and autopsy.
There’s a couple of “live-cd” distributions I’ll also give a go, Helix and Penguin Sleuth Kit.
If I had access to the miraculous tools they use on CSI I’d have this fixed by now.
Any of you had similar experiences and success stories? Or, if you can help, please let me know.
Professional data recovery services are prohibitively expensive.
Along with the other suggestions I’ve thrown at you, you could have a look at TestDisk also see the SKI article on it here
Just as well it is a long weekend :)
I’ve had a similar experience and a success story, but purely because I _wrote down_ the partition table once I had set the machine up. Which reminds me; I need to do that for this machine.
So, can’t really help that much :-(
I’ve just run TestDisk which probably works similarly to gpart. Unfortunately it failed also.
Aidan, who writes down their partition table?
Aidan does, obviously.
Helpful.
Eh, I know our hardware engineer has some data recovery tools for windows.
You boot into a windows machine with the drive attached and it will find what it can.
If you’re still stuck after the weekend I’ll get a copy from him of whatever he has and we can give them a shot. I assume you still have a pc somewhere with an ide slot spare, if not I have one in the flat….
I have a PC at home but no Windows. I could use one in work.
That’d be awesome, thanks.