My laptop was damaged a couple of months ago. Just a short drop from the couch, but it was hard enough to make the HD inaccessible. I took it to a local, respected shop but they couldn't save any of the data and simply installed a new HD after consulting me.
I have the old drive and would still like to retrieve the data, if the price is right. What should I ask about when looking for another repair shop?
I'm running CentOS 5.5.
A couple of weeks ago, my 500 GB disk crashed after suffering an accelerating error rate for a couple of days.
Now that I have a new disk in place, I want to mount my old disk, which is (was) an LVM disk, as a second disk and recover files from it if possible.
The question is, how do I go about this?
If I mount the old disk:
# mount /dev/sdb1 /sdb1
the top-level directory shows only two subdirectories:
lost+found, which is empty; restored, which is an image of files recovered from old disk's predecessor.
'df' shows (or appears to show) that the disk is 11% full. Sorry, I don't recall how full the disk was before it crashed.
How do I get the system to recognize the LVM structure on the old disk & mount it?
Or is the directory structure too corrupted? Do I need to send the disk out to a recovery service?
P.S. Have aleady done some poking around with lvmdiskscan, which shows the old disk whether it's mounted or not, and vgchange -ay, which doesn't appear to do anything.
I have 6 disks (partitions) combined into one lvm volgroup in my server. The server have been online for a year.
And today, suddenly it hangs. At first, I thought it's caused by network lag, because after a couple minutes the server is responsive again. But then I felt something very wrong. I can't access any file that stored on the lvm.
After some dmesg, fdisk -l and a peek at /etc/lvm/archive/*, I found that one of the partitions used for lvm volgroup is missing. Tried a reboot, and the suspected disk is undetected even in BIOS. Must be caused by bad block on the disk's sector zero or something. I think missing one pv makes the volgroup failed to initiate. So, no volgroup, no logical volume. And I can't access the files on it for sure.
Is there a way I can save/rescue data from other non-damaged disks? I have no luck finding similar situation (and solution) by searching on google.
I use Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and my wife who is not an Ubuntu convert still uses Microsoft Windows. Recently her ageing PC stopped functioning and she bought a more powerful PC with Windows 7 as the OS. Unfortunately, most of her specialised work software refuses to run on Windows 7, but she still wants / requires access to retrieve information from the old drive which was running (past tense) Windows XP Professional up until recently. Because of her fear of breaking the warranty on her new shiny PC, she won't let me remove the casing and fit the old drive. So, the question is, if I fit her old drive into my Ubuntu machine would it harm either my PC or her hdd? Also, these new SATA drives have no jumper settings (slave/master etc). How do I set it up and how do I get the information from this hdd?
View 2 Replies View RelatedYesterday, my windows xp died and I can not do anything with that, but I would like to rescue my important files from hdd before format. I open ubuntu trial version from cd but i can not access my hdd. I find my hdd in system->administration->disk utility but I can not go anywhere from there.
When I solve this problem I would like to try ubuntu as my os but i am worried that some programs may not work on it . Like for example my bamboo tablet, fm2010, adobe ilustrator, autocad.
basically the situation I'm in is someone mistakenly expanded an NAS without unmounting the drive on the server. This corrupted the superblock and its apparent that all the backups are no good. The drive in question was expanded from about 800gigs to 1.8TBs, its done via an NAS.
At this point I'm most concerned about getting the files off the drive, I can deal with resetting the file system but I really need those files. This happened within a week of me joining this group so I'm kind of doing damage control here, backups were not taken of this particular drive.
I was messing around with Bash scripting just now and was wondering if there was a way to organize the output of a command into an array. Like the Bash equivalent of the PHP explode() function.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI am in the process of recovering data from some damaged hard drives.
I am copying the data to a recovery folder on the safe system disk where it is being sorted.
Some of the data/files I do not want to keep.
I want to delete them.
However the permissions are such that it will not let me.
I need to be root.
I don't really want to flaff about in the 1980's geek terminal environment ... just want to right click and select delete.
Is there any way within the GUI to be as one with Root, all powerful, all seeing ......
following problem. A friend phoned me in despair. Her Ubuntu didn't start any more - ASUS-Laptop switched on stops at a ramfs-prompt.
I started Puppy-Linux from DVD-Drive. Worked fine. But puppy can't mount her /dev/sda1 partition either. At least you can see that the partition is still there. Fsck stops with an error. May be the initial problem is a sort of bad hardware by which bad bytes were written to the hard drive. Hard drive and/or memory could be replaced but not the data.
I've been using ubuntu about a year, so I have a fair amount of experience with it. Today I was trying to install ubuntu on my new laptop, which doesn't have an optical drive. I don't have a usb stick, so I attempted to partition my external hard drive. I stupidly clicked "erase disk" on startup disk creator and erased the entire drive instead of the partition. I want to get back the files I had on this external. I searched and managed to find that people had been successful with testdisk. when I choose to analyse, it only finds the partition I created for the live cd.
When I choose advanced, I can find my older partition (FAT32) but when I choose to undelete I get:
Code:
No file found, filesystem seems damaged.
When I choose boot I get:
Code:
Boot sector
Bad
Backup boot sector
Bad
Sectors are identical.
A valid FAT Boot sector must be present in order to access. Any data; even if the partition is not bootable. I searched but I couldn't find anyone receiving this error message or how to deal with it. So I tried using photorec. Photorec is recovering all of my documents currently but without the filenames and file structure, it's more or less worthless.
some info on the drive - it's a USB 2.0 portable hard drive (PQI H560), one partition spanning all 640GB, NTFS. Used almost exclusively on Linux (arch and ubuntu), but initially formatted on Windows 7.The hard drive has quite a lot of hard links on it, as it was a timemachine-like backup system.And now the issue itself:Today I made the mistake of taking out my portable hard drive from my Linux system and plugging it in a Windows 7 box. Everything worked nice, I took a movie from the drive, and it lay dormant for an hour or so. After that I took the drive out (forgot to unmount :/) and put it back in my Linux.
Any idea why did it break so bad? I thought NTFS was kind of durable.Best if there would be something nondestructive (be able to get the data while preserving every bit of the drive in it's current state - just to be sure it doesn't break anything)
I haven't run into this with ubuntu before. I am trying to recover some files from a damaged hard drive and when I try to use the no change to computer option I get to a log in screen. But, I don't have a user name or a password at that point.
View 1 Replies View RelatedA section of the hard drive on my laptop is damaged but the laptop has genearlly been running fine as it seems to very rarely touch that section (once every few months). However, when installing some updates the computer has hit that section which means it becomes unresponsive and makes a nasty clunking sound every 10s or so. Because of this I've had to abort the update but now whenever I try to run 'dpkg --configure -a' to sort out the problem caused by the interrupted update I get the same freezing up and clunking. The message that appears when I run the command is adding extension /usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.0/program/mailmerge.py... and then it freezes.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI accidentally did:
$ strace -o /usr/libexec/dovecot/dovecot-lda -d user
Of course this truncated the dovecot-lda file I was trying to trace down to a size of zero.
Is there a standard way to get this back from the RPM ?
That package has some configuration files I don't want copied over with the original RPM versions.
I am hoping for some nice option to rpm that will retrieve lost files like that and get the permissions and ownerships set right as opposed to brute force rpm2cpio and then manually copy the file into place and then try to figure out correct ownership and perms.
I have an XD card with lots of pictures in it which suddenly stopped working, it gives me "card error" messages in my camera (and any other one) and it refuses to mount on my laptop's card reader (which does work in F11 for XD cards, I've tried other ones).So I'm trying to use some program to make an image of what's in the card, like ddrescue or dd_rhelp. But they all need me to mount the disk, which I just can't. I have tried to mount it manually, but I'm not even sure what device I should point to.
So my question is, how can I mount a faulty drive in such a way that any of these programs can make an image? Or maybe there is a smarter way to try to get my pictures back? (There are some non-free programs in Windows which may seemingly help, but I'd like to figure out how to do this in Linux).
The following quote is the sad, sad story of a thumb drive with the partition table nuked, as told by a friend of mine:
Quote:
Data was recovered from an XP system by booting with a BartPC CD and copying onto a USB thumb drive. Nothing unusual.
System was rebooted into the XP install CD.
The first drive that was found was the 16gb thumb drive (AKA flash drive) and the person (re) installing XP didn't catch the fact that XP presented the 16gb thumb drive instead of the 160gb hard drive.
The drive partition function in XP deleted the partition table - on the thumb drive.
A freeware utility in Windows shows the data but can't recover the file names, so that everything is gobbledygook. Does anybody know of a utility or program under Linux that can help? I have a laptop running F 12 and can do the work if needed, but don't know what program to use.
My OS hard drive crashed on my file server. and now I am trying to "restore" my drives.
I am having problems re-creating without erasing data my Linux LVM drive. I would like some instructions on how to re-create my logicalVolumeGroups and phisical groups so I can re-mount my Linux LVM partition.
Here is my specific information.
when I do a pvdisplay I only get my boot vg_files group listed
pvdisplay
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/sda2
VG Name vg_files
PV Size 74.33 GB / not usable 577.00 KB
Allocatable yes (but full)
[Code]...
I have a laptop with Fedora 12 on it and I accidentally did an dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda (since then I learned to think before I type)
anyway, I stopped it in time (I hope), it only zeroed first 60 MB. So, it killed partition table and boot partition. What I need is home partition, and it should be untouched. home is on a LVM device (fedora default install settings), and I tried testdisk (supposedly handles LVM) but it found only one partition (I guess it's a LVM physical device, as there should be 3 partitions, /, /home and swap) and said it's not recoverable.
Is there a way to get access to files on that partition (partition itself, including file table should be untouched). Partition contains various data (video, audio, and text) I need back (and it's my data, not backed up, and not something I can redownload). Is there any software that can help me with this, and if not, is it theoretically doable (I believe it should be, as the partition itself is not damaged, so it should be possible to read file names and link them with data on disk, am I right)? what is a good way to image the disk, so I can reinstall the laptop while trying to rescue data from image?
I have setup a local repository containing several .rpm files. I created a comps.xml file outlining the category and groups for the local repository. However, when I issue the yum grouplist command, I get the following error:
Failed to add groups file for repository: localRepo - comps file is empty/damaged
However, if I try to install one of the the packages in the repository, it works just fine.
Here are the steps I took to create the repodata:
The comps.xml and repository are stored in the directory:
/var/www/html/myrepo/x86_64
cd /var/www/html/myrepo/x86_64
createrepo -g comps.xml .
[Code]....
I've got an old EIDE hard drive that used to be used for a dual-boot WinXP and Linux (not sure what version - either RH9 or FC1), and I'd like to pull some data off it. That computer died, and I reformatted the Windows partition, but left the Linux portion alone. My current Linux (FC10 + XP) computer uses a SATA hard drive, and I'd like to get the data from the old drive to the new one. I've connected the hard drive normally, jumpered as a slave drive. Linux now boots normally, but I can't access the older hard drive. I tried the techniques in the following thread: [url] and commented there (with more info), but I thought I would be more likely to get a response by starting a new thread.
Here's a summary of what happened: ran "fdisk -l": the command saw both hard drives ran "tail -f /var/log/messages" and got the following: Jul 30 16:00:44 localhost kernel: EXT3 FS on sdb8, internal journal Jul 30 16:00:44 localhost kernel: EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Jul 30 16:00:44 localhost hald: mounted /dev/sdb8 on behalf of uid 500 sdb8 was a FAT partition I had set up for moving files back and forth between XP and Linux (none of the other partitions were reported). ran "vgscan", which only returned one volume group When I ran FC10's Local Volume Management tool, it sees the hard drive and its partitions, but reports them as "Uninitialized Entities".
Can I decrypt an encrypted drive without loss of data?
View 13 Replies View RelatedUsing F12 with a LVM Volume, Single disk with OS on and boot partition. The OS HDD is getting i/o errors, but will still boot to the login screen. I've removed the HDD and connected it to a Fedora Live OS on my laptop, connected the HDD and it registers as :
[root@localhost]# fdisk -l /dev/sdd
Disk /dev/sdd: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e0069
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 * 1 26 204800 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdd2 26 30401 243991201 8e Linux LVM
And it tried to mount /dev/sdd2 to view and see if I can recover some files.
[root@localhost]# mount /dev/sdd2 /mnt -t ext4[root@localhost james]# mount /dev/sdd2 /mnt -t ext4
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdd2,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so
Any way to mount the partition to allow me to try and get some data back, or if trying to do a full backup of the drive you can get it to ignore i/o errors.
I have Fedora Core 4 PPTP server (poptop) that died (motherboard). I am setting up a replacement system but need to get the data off of the drive from the dead FC4 system. They are just plain text config files. So I removed the drive and mounted it to another system using a USB enclosure. But I can't mount of the root partition, only the boot partition. I have done some Googling and see that the reason is that the / partition is an LVM format. But of course the replacement system already has a /dev/logvol..... type of partition defined. So how can I mount the LVM partition from the dead system on the new system to get the data? Understanding this will be valuable for similar situations in the future.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI have 3 drives in my computer. I installed Fedora 11 on my two biggest one, with the LVM treating them as one single drive. I attempted to install XP on my last drive. As I was installing, I selected my third drive (I'm 100% sure it is the correct drive as it is an 80gb whilst the others are 120 and 200 respectively) and told it to delete the partition on that drive and format. After I did that, it started to format, starting with my 120! I'm fairly sure that it was merely a quick format, as it only took 5-10 seconds for it to format, and that my data is still there. Is there any way to recover my "lost" data, or did I just really screw myself over?
View 6 Replies View RelatedI'm actually not a Linux newbie, but I'm DEFINITELY no expert either... I'm trying to copy all my data(approx 50 GB) from a usb drive(western digital 250GB) with ntfs partition in one go... The problem is that it only fails for big transfers... works fine for smaller transfers like 1Gigs or less... I have just one internal hdd partitioned into two ext3 partitions.. so I have sda1(Primary.. mount pt /), sda2(swap) and sda3(mount pt /piyush)... The usb drive comes up as sdb(sdb1).. just has one ntfs partition... I've also installed the ntf-3g drivers.... but doesn't seem to work... I've also noticed that when the machine hangs and I try to shut down, it fails and I get a message again again... (sdb1- no sense detected) or something like this... don't remember the exact message... will post the exact one if no one is able to figure out what's wrong...
View 4 Replies View RelatedThis is my 6th install of Fedora, begining with Fedora 4 I have had very good luck with all until 9 and I lost all data on drive by my bad clicks in a frustrated session. Now I have a great install of Fedora 10 with the exception that I fouled up and typed in a user (myself-'andybill') and am finding out that the work I need to do cannot be maximized by operating in user - andybill, I need to be super user. I have just moved and have not done any collaboration with our senior partner in a data development start up that he is the intellectual property in deed and law. For me to get back on track my using this OS I have to be master of all libraries, drivers etc. I am a nu-b (only 2 1/2 years, with no computer science background. This explains why I need step by step commands without abbriviated lingo-So if I can remove myself as andybill, make all root
View 13 Replies View RelatedI just installed F13 x86_64 on a system that used to be running Windows 7.
The boot drive is a SATA drive attached to the motherboard which is working fine.
However, my data drive is an NTFS partition filling a 3.6TB SATA raid.
It's GPT--Gparted sees 3 unknown partitions, and gdisk shows:
Code:
How do I mount this in Fedora 13? I had intended to shrink the NTFS partition so that I can create an ext4 partition to move the data to. Will this be possible?
I've got a LOT of valuable data on this drive, and nothing else big enough to store it.
I have recently set up a mail server running dovecot and everything is fine. However, I now want to retrieve the contents of 2 pop mail boxes and insert them into the IMAP structure under dovecot. I need to check for spam and sort them according to sender and recipient.
What is my best software option for retrieving the mail?
This is a good way to backup my current system:
How to backup your system to restore your server incase the hard disk is damaged.
- 160gb is where i install CentOS (pretty much the hard drive for operation system) - Lets call this drive A
- Two 1TB drives run in RAID 1, using software RAID (this is where i will store personal data, pictures, movies, music, etc...) - Lets call this RAID 1 setup drive B
I am planning to run a virtual Win Server 2008 using Xen and have that be my domain controller. I will use samba to share drive B and have the network drive map when user login to the domain.
- If for some reasons i have to reinstall CentOS, this pretty much mean drive A will be formatted and reinstalled. Knowing my self i probably will goof up some config in CentOS and will need to reinstall the OS to fix it. Since drive B will be the centralize location for my home network, i dont want to lose the data. Will i be able to re-setup the RAID setup of drive B and still have all the data stored on it intact after a reinstall?
- Is the separation of OS drive and data drive recommended?
- Are there any better way to accomplish my setup? I am pretty much just looking to make a linux file server and windows on client's end.