Recovering a failed (SSD) hard drive. Unknown partition type.

[fred smith]

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 08:02:07PM -0700, linux guy wrote:
> Is there any way to sniff out the old partition table ?    What would
> I need other than the partition table sizes ?    I know I had boot,
> swap and / partitions...

FYI:

A year or so ago I had a USB HD with 200-300 gigs of irreplaceable
data on it, formatted as (iirc) ext3. then I accidentally (some 
might say "stupidly") did a DOS format on the drive. MAJOR OOPS.

I tried some free tools to recover files, and didn't find them very
helpful (one of 'em saved bazillions of files with no useful filenames).

googling around I found a company doing business in INdia selling
software that will recover windows/dos/mac/linux filesystems, and can
run on windows or linux. not finding anything else promising, I sprung
for the 50 bucks.

the software is somewhat flaky, isn't necessarily trivial to use,
some of the options don't work in intuitive ways. but to shorten this
long story, I managed to recover pretty much everything that was on
the drive, after banging on it for a few days. 

I had some questions about how to use the software that I sent
via email to their support email address, a couple of times, and have
yet to receive any response from them, so it's clearly a case of
caveat emptor.

As best as I can remember, it was called "Recover Data for Linux".

So, if you've got a hosed partition table, you may be in a similar
position to what I was in, so maybe, just maybe, it would be helpful
for you.

YMMV! I'm not providing any warranties.


> 
> Is there any way to copy (and possibly recover) the raw data from the
> drive ?  Possibly using dd or something ?
> 
> I tried using partimage, but as you guys know, if there is no
> partition (partition table), it can't copy it.
> 
> What are the chances that if I could recover the partition table that
> the data would still be there ?
> 
> Aside: this caught me TOTALLY off guard.  SMART was enabled for this
> drive, the drive was checked periodically, etc.   This laptop hadn't
> moved off my desk in months and was basically only rebooted to run
> newer kernels.
> 
> I did my last backup about a month ago.  I have a backup of all my
> emails, so that is good.   All my digital images are stored on a
> separate drive, so none of them were lost.   I'm trying to figure out
> what content I added in the last month... documents, etc, that got
> stored in /home/me.   I shudder at the thought of sorting this all
> out.
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-- 
---- Fred Smith -- fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us -----------------------------
                        The Lord is like a strong tower. 
             Those who do what is right can run to him for safety.
--------------------------- Proverbs 18:10 (niv) -----------------------------