Re: [hampshire] Data recovery

On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 02:54:16AM +0000, Alasdair Ross wrote:
> I haven't attempted any kind of data recovery before so I am reluctant to
> try anything without any advice.
>

As was suggested, make a backup first.

At LUGRadio I had an issue with some files being lost/corrupted on a FAT digital camera stick. A
very clever man came over and helped me with the aid of the mtools package. The cunning thing to
do is copy (using dd) the partition onto your hard disk and do the recovery on that. Leave the
memory card well alone. That way you can backup the image on your hard disk and try all manner of
stuff to get it back without risking making things worse on the stick. We ended up fudging bits
directly in the disk image and the files came back.

Magicrescue also looks interesting:-

Magic Rescue scans a block device for file types it knows how to recover
and calls an external program to extract them. It looks at "magic bytes"
in file contents, so it can be used both as an undelete utility and for
recovering a corrupted drive or partition. As long as the file data is
there, it will find it.
.

Cheers,
Al.