I love you testdisk!

[Bazooka Joe]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 5:12 AM, Hiisi <saippua5 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-01-10 at 08:37 -0600, Richard Shaw wrote:
>> Just wanted to plug testdisk[1] in case others end up in the same situation.
>>
> <--SNIP-->
>>
>> Richard
>>
>> [1] http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
>
> Thank you for your message! I have a disk that had been used under
> windoze xp. A few years ago something went wrong with it and I had to
> buy a new one. I choose Fedora as my primary distro since that.
> Yesterday after reading your message I found the disk on the shelf,
> opened computer case and plugged it in. It's impossible to boot from it
> and when it's connected as slave Fedora 12 reports smart-errors and
> unable to mount it. So, I did:
> yum install testdisk
> and ran testdisk as root. It sees the disk:
> Partition table type (auto): Intel
> /dev/sdb: Device Configuration Overlay (DCO) present.
> Disk /dev/sdb - 41 GB / 38 GiB - ATA Maxtor 2F040L0
> Partition table type: Intel
> And correctly sees it's partitioning:
>   * HPFS - NTFS              0   1  1  1274 254 63   20482812
>     NTFS, 10487 MB / 10001 MiB
>   L HPFS - NTFS           1275   1  1  2549 254 63   20482812
>     NTFS, 10487 MB / 10001 MiB
>   L HPFS - NTFS           2550   1  1  4995 254 63   39294927
>     NTFS, 20 GB / 18 GiB
>
> There's a lot of read errors in the log file, but it starts the backup
> procedure and creates image.dd file under working system (F12). However
> it halts after some time with the following message:
> No space left for the file image.
> It's strange because there's sufficient space on the drive (9.3 GB in /
> and 43 GB in /home, all etx3). I tested it a few times and each time it
> hangs when image.dd is exactly of 2 GB in size (to be precise it is
> 2147483647).
> What's wrong with it? How can I restore data from the disk?
> Thank you!
> --


If you have disk errors ddrescue is your friend.

http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue

Or you could try testdisk's sister photorec to just recover documents.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec