Re: Harddrive woes

[K.G.]

On Fri, 11 Nov 2005 09:37:26 +0100 Michael Friis <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi, I'm having some trouble with a harddrive.
> 
> First of it held one huge reiserfs partition with a lot of stuff on
> it, but more importantly all my pictures. I then needed some space to
> install linux on the thing, so I cleared some space and fired up
> parted. I asked parted to resize the partition so that there would be
> 10GB of space at the end of the disk. I went away, but when I came
> back parted had stopped, not giving any error message and apparently
> not done. If I check the drive now, the huge partition is still there,
> but it doesn't say which partitiontype it is (should be reiserfs i
> suppose), this suggest the superblock is toast right? The "rescue"
> option in parted segfaults. Right now, I just want to salvage my
> pictures somehow. Any suggestions as to how this could be accomplished
> would be very welcome.
> 
> Kind regards
> Michael

Waouh, bad :/

I don't really know what could have happened, the reiserfs work is
not done by parted but by the reiserfs lib. So I don't really know
how to recover too.

The only real scale data recovery i've ever done was using a tool called
foremost. It works for all filesystems cause it don't even try to read
it but instead recover contiguous files of known type by scanning the
whole partition and detecting headers and footers of the type you want.

It produces best result when you eliminate duplicates of each recovered
files (they can be many, depending on how you used your files), the
easiest and fastest way to do that is probably to script an md5 computation
on every recovered files and delete ones that have the same sum as an
already seen one. To store already seen sums I just created an empty
file for each sum with a filename equal to the sum in a dedicated directory
and let reiserfs do the search in something like O(log(n)) time.

Good luck,
Guillaume Knispel