General :: Recovering Ubuntu After Filesystem Was Overwritten Using Dd
Sep 21, 2011
I had an Ubuntu installation on my laptop, on an encrypted LVM (this was /dev/sda1).
I was planning to write an Arch Linux image to my USB drive (/dev/sdc1), following this guide - [URL] USB_Installation_Media#Overwrite_the_USB_drive. Instead, I accidentally overwrote my Ubuntu by using
dd if=archlinux.iso of=/dev/sda
Is there any hope of recovering my Ubuntu installation, or is it totally hopeless, and I rather recover as much data as possible?
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Feb 17, 2010
I was trying to decrease the size of my main partition so I could create a secondary and install Windows 7 to.I was using Norton's partition software. My computer had to reboot and before reaching Windows XP it started doing the resizing. For some reason it failed in shrinking my main partition. I'm not sure if any harm was done while it was trying to do this.I proceeded to run the Windows 7 installer, under the impression I could just install Win 7 to the same drive and leave all my personal files alone. Right when the installation started during the "Copying files" stage I hard reset the computer after getting nervous and changing my mind..
I booted up Ubuntu Live and found that my main file system had been cleared, and only a few tiny temp Windows 7 installation files where there.I am sure there were no deep formatting done, only a quick format by the win 7 installer. there is any software I can run in Ubuntu to scan the drive for files to recover them, because the new file system overwrote the old one.
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Jan 10, 2010
I have an external 3.5" USB 250Gb HDD which is showing symptoms of hardware problems (repeated /var/log/messages errors of "reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd"). This was originally plugged in to my NSLU2 running Debian Etch. I have just installed Ubuntu Desktop 9.10 to a spare Pentium-3M laptop and was hoping to copy the contents of this HDD to a fresh drive. However, I cannot mount it even read-only; mount -o ro /dev/sde3 /mnt/disk fails, and the /var/log/messages error is "recovery required on readonly filesystem", "write access unavailable, cannot proceed". I cannot understand why mounting a disk read-only should require write access. Following advice I googled elsewhere, I tried running mke2fs -n /dev/sde3 to try to list the alternative superblocks - but once again I got the error that the device was read-only. How can I go about accessing the data on this disk?
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Apr 17, 2010
I just got an Acer netbook Aspire One. I put the Ubuntu remix on it successfully, and was using it for several days without problems. Now all of a sudden when I turn on my computer I get a grub error message with a command prompt. I've tried following the direction to restore grub but I'm getting stuck right away on the command to mount my ubuntu partition. After I type "sudo mount /dev/sda4 /mnt", I keep getting the error message "mount: you must specify the filesystem type."
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Nov 16, 2010
Is there any way to recover an overwritten linux file? I uncompresed a tar file which overwrote some of my files. I read somewhere you can umount your home directory.
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Apr 22, 2010
I was syncing my palm pilot but some setting must've been wrong: instead of putting the files from my hard disk to the palm pilot it took the blank files from the palm pilot and wrote them over my back-up. Anyway, I'm about sick of palm but I want to get this file back. Is there anyway I can restore to an earlier version of this file? I'm about to reboot with sys rescue cd.
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Mar 15, 2011
Can I recover the file which has been overwritten.
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Apr 9, 2010
A colleague of mine has a Linux box (running Debian I believe) with an SVN repository on it. The repository directory and files 'owner' is my colleauge. We are both members of a group called 'users'. He manages several projects both Linux and Windows apps, while I have one Windows app. For the Windows apps, we both use TortoiseSVN via an SSH link to commit/update. Performing the command 'ls -l' shows the repository files and folders on the Linux box to have the following permissions:
-rwxrwx--- john users
However, when my colleauge commits to the repository, the permissions change to:
-rwxrwx--- john john
This then means I get 'Permission denied' when trying to access the repository myself as it appears that the group permissions have been overwritten with only 'owner' permissions. To fix this, a 'chown -R' command is applied to the files/folders to set the permissions back to owner/group, but each time he writes to the repository, the issue repeats.
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Jun 27, 2010
While attempting to install FC12, Anaconda took it upon itself to overwrite the partition on my backup disk. Now I need to figure out if there's a way to get at least some of my data back. If there's a better place for this question, please let me know and I will happily move it. Using Linux since 1993, other Unixoid systems since 1986. I bought this machine back in 2004 or so. It was a pretty decent machine back then, but it's showing its age now: 370Mb of RAM, 2 hard disks with 80Gb and 120Gb (I don't think the other specs are relevant, but just let me know if I'm wrong). In a fit of insanity, I decided to install Gentoo on it. Don't get me wrong: I love certain things about Gentoo. But the constant fiddling that's required, while it can be fun at first, gets old kinda quick.
So various and sundry things have been going wrong with it here and there (CD-ROM, sound card, etc ad infinitum), and, finally, it wouldn't even load X any more (almost certainly some final Gentoo update which broke something) and I said "screw it, I'll just put Fedora on it." This is what I use at work, and plus I have a good friend who has far more patience with admin stuff than I do and Fedora is what he knows. So, last night, I pick up an FC12 CD that I have lying around and decide to finally just reinstall the whole thing. I went so far as to buy myself a Passport USB drive, 319Gb, and have been backing up up all my stuff very regularly to that drive. I go through one final cycle of backing up and verifying before I start the reinstall.
So my drive is solid, and contains everything I could possibly need (and probably quite a bit of stuff I don't). After booting into FC12, I used Palimpsest to explore the partitions on the existing hard disks. Not sure which was which, I mounted the Passport, where I have cleverly saved a copy of my fstab. Using this, I can see which of my partitions were /boot, /, /home, etc. Most of my personal data has been put into separate partitions so that I could reinstall without blowing away the data. I hope that I can do that there, but, if I can't, no matter: I have a backup. I find some bits of empty space and delete a few of the partitions and recreate them, consolidating the empty space. Still confident in my backup, of course.
So I run Anaconda. Nothing happens. Eventually, I figure out that it won't run the graphical interface because I don't have enough memory. I can use the text version, no biggie. It gets to the part about the disks. I tell it which hard disk to install itself onto. For some reason I think it's going to pop up and ask me about the existing partitions and whether I want to keep them or rewrite them (maybe that's a previous version of Anaconda? or a different installer altogether, who can remember). It does not. It babbles something at me about LVM (which I've personally never really used before), and then promptly locks up. Obviously standard Fedora on a low-RAM machine like this is doomed to failure.
I poke around on the Internet, and I eventually stumble on the Fedora "spins" and select FC13/LXDE. Hopefully this will have better luck. Reboot with the new CD, take a look at my hard disks. It has completely overwritten the old partitions, replacing them with LVM partitions. But not a big deal: I have a backup. Take a look at the Passport. Its ext2 filesys has also been replaced with an LVM partition. Proceed to beat head against wall. So, obviously what happened is, since I (foolishly) had the backup drive mounted at the time I ran Anaconda, it assumed I wanted it to take over that drive as well, and just formatted everything it could lay hands on as LVM. It certainly never asked me my opinion on the matter.
But, fine, I shouldn't have had it mounted. The question is, what do I do now? My first, panicked instinct, was to just set the partition type back to 83 (I believe LVM is 8E), which I did (using cfdisk). That might have made it worse; I dunno. But I'm pretty sure I haven't written anything else to the disk since then. I've tried testdisk (nothing useful; although it can seemingly find the underlying deleted partition, it won't actually do anything with it), and a bevvy of Windows Linux recovery programs (Stellar Phoenix, DiskInternals, Raise, and R-Linux), all of which were completely useless except for R-Linux, which scanned the disk for eight hours and was still going when I had to interrupt it (I may come back to that one, but so far it doesn't look too promising).
My primary problem is that I can't make an image of the disk because this little Passport is the biggest hard drive in the house. I would certainly feel better if I could image everything off it and then play with the image. But, of course, it doesn't matter that very little of that 319Gb was actually being used: I still need 319Gb worth of space to make an image. I ordered another (larger) Passport, which should be here Wed. Once I have that I believe I can do something like so:
Code:
dd ifs=/dev/sdX ofs=/mnt/bigpassport/smallpassport.img bs=512
Right? Then I can muck about with that image in some amount of safety.
Of course, I also have the original hard drives, which are not so large. testdisk can identify the original partitions on those too, but, again, won't actually do anything with them. If I could find something that would image just the partitions I care about, I could probably save those as well, but I don't have any other external hard drives with 120Gb of space free. Can I somehow take the info that testdisk is giving me about those original partitions and use dd to get only that part of the image? Are there other recovery tools I haven't considered? I have a Windows (Win7) laptop, a Linux laptop (FC10, I think), although its power cord is flaky so it's not too reliable, a smaller Mac, a really old Windows box (XP on it, I think), and this formerly-Linux box, which I can only boot off CD's at this point. There's nothing on this disk worth the 500 bux that professional data recovery would charge me, but it's worth a day or two of my life to try to get at least some of it back.
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Oct 4, 2010
I had written a source code of C++ and complied it with the same name using the following command line.For example: c++ source-code.cpp -o source-code.cpp.Now my source code has been replaced by the executable program.Is there any way to retrieve my source-code.
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Jul 3, 2011
My main hard disk died and I replaced it. After installing windows in a small partition in /dev/sda, I thought I will try linux mint and went for it. (I need windows to play AOE, but ubuntu is my primary OS)I didnt see the options properly or some distraction, I choose the "install alongside windows" option probably expecting it to install it in the unallocated partition next to the windows installation. I had completely forgotten my second internal drive /dev/sdb which has the backup data. Linux mint went and installed itself on that drive.
Is there a way to recover individual files from the second harddrive. Now if I boot or open it through live cd, all I see in the linux mint file systems. I want to aleast recover my CV/resume from the second drive. The second drive is a single ext4 file system The old drive is completely dead, it doesnt even get recognized when I attach it to SATA.
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Mar 11, 2011
I am trying to mount a file image, like this
mount -o loop /tmp/apps.img /media/apps
But I get the following:
mount: you must specify the filesystem type
I try ext3:
mount -o loop /tmp/apps.img /media/apps -t ext3
dmesg says:
error: can't find ext3 filesystem on dev loop6.
I've also tried ext2, vfat etc. How can I detect the filesystem type of apps.img?
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Mar 24, 2010
I've had a look at some similar threads but as I'm very new to linux they're already a bit technical for me. Sorry, this calls for someone with patience. I gather from other threads that disconnecting an external drive without unmounting is a no-no, and this seems to be the likely cause. Now the disk is read only and I'm unable to change any settings through the usual control panel on ubuntu. I'm just not familiar with the terminal instructions. I tried to cut and past a few command lines from other threads but I got some warnings that proceding could damage data. Like this one: WARNING! Running e2fsck on a mounted filesystem may cause SEVERE filesystem damage.
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May 18, 2011
I am very new to linux, and I have a question regarding the filesystem check (fsck). The power recently went out and when I tried to restart linux the following error appears:
*/dev/sda1 contains file system w/errors, check forced it then goes on to say..
*An error occured during the file system check. Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot when you leave the shell. Give root password for maintenance (or type Control-D to continue) I wasn't sure what to do, but checked some other online forums and they suggested running fsck manually - so I typed in the root password - and used the command, "fsck -A -V ; echo == $? ==" it then gave the following message
*WARNING!!! Running e2fsck on a mounted filesystem may cause SEVERE filesystem damage
*Would you like to continue (y/n)
Again, I wasn't sure what to do so i just checked no. I then manually turned off the computer and was prompted at the beginning to press Alt-3. I was brought to another screen and it informed me one of the drives was degraded and suggested rebuilding the array. I tried doing this, but it still brings me back to the original error of, "/dev/sda1 contains file system w/errors, check forced," and the process continues.
Also, when I tried to rebuild the array, I didn't backup any of the data on our home directory before doing this (which was probably a big mistake). After being prompted to type the root password, I was able to give the ls command and look at all the directories...the home directory where our data was stored was empty and I am afraid I may have lost some information. Is there a possibility that data was lost when I was trying to rebuild using the old drives?
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Apr 27, 2011
I have multiple servers, all of which have the same account with the same password, setup by someone who know longer is around. Is there any way to figure out what that password is, so i can create the same account on a new server without having to reset the password on all the other servers. I'm not sure what resetting that password would break on the others, so I dont want to do that.
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Dec 22, 2010
The man page for rm says Quote:Note that if you use rm to remove a file, it is usually possible to recover the contents of that file. Do you know of a way to recover a file deleted with rm?
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May 13, 2010
v10.4 in place, new install. Now this is really weird, my mtab keeps on being replaced with a default mtab (from where?). I loose my NFS mounts and only notice when they cannot be reached. This also happens it seems randomly (just make it easier to debug and fix)
Now what process has the ability/authority to replace my mtab, that process should have sudo authorization, correct? Is there some kind of silly root kit doing this?
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Jan 16, 2011
was doing dual boot Ubuntu with win xp (on separate drives ) . XP went curropt I reinstall it and it over written GRUB . So , now I no more get option to boot into Ubuntu ...how can I install grub with live CD I am not an experienced user so kindly tell step by steep procedure . (Ubuntu boot directory is /hda7)
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Dec 6, 2010
By mistake I've overwritten some of my project files. Is there anyway in ubuntu to recover those files.
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Mar 4, 2010
I have installed fedora 11 in my system. While installing it asked me encrypted password which i passed. But I forgot that. Now the problem is whenever i boot my system before going to root itself it is asking for volume encrypted password, which as i told you i have forgot. Now i am not able to access my hard disk since it is completely locked. Is there any way to decrypt the password or unlock it. Or if that is not possible can data be recovered,which is my primary requirement..
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May 24, 2011
Lately when i open my computer i encountered failed in loading system. its goes like this. Unexpected error, run fsck manually...log in as root. I have to log in as root and type fsck try to fix bad blocks. the mandriva ask me to reboot so i reboot my computer. after loading system, in log in screen. I click my username then type my password and press enter. There is a message prompt on me. "Your home directory is listed as:'/home/Gonzalo' but it does not appear to exist. Do you want to log in with the / (root) directory? it is unlikely anything will work unless you use a failsafe session.
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Mar 8, 2010
i just want to know whether we can recover the deleted openoffice spreadsheets. iam using ubuntu 9.10. i don't know how to recover the openoffice files after deleting it from trash.
And i also wanted to know whether we can recover old content of openoffice spread sheet file after it had been saved with the new content.
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Jan 18, 2010
I reinstalled ubuntu linux and lost some mySQL database files that were located in the /var/lib/mysql/ folder. I need to recover them ASAP. How do i go about it. Is it possible to recover .frm, .myb files using scalpel. Is there an alternate software I could use?
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Jun 3, 2010
I overwrote windows with ubuntu netbook remix and lost pictures and videos. I need to recover them, they are from the last eight years and very important.
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May 6, 2011
I didn't know a resize operation on a 750 GB disk was going to take 40+ hours, and I was biting my nails the whole time, until the power went out when "only" 8 hours where left.I can still mount the partition, and many of the files are still there, but some files show as '? ? ? ? ? filename.ext' with ls -l.If I try to go inside such a directory: Input/output error.
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May 10, 2011
I was installing Ubuntu to the internal disk in my main machine, with all external drives unplugged for safety - then discovered I had accidentally chosen the external drive and it wasn't unplugged. (Seeing three drives not two listed as installation targets should have tipped me off, but I guess my IQ was low that day.)The external drive, in compliance with Murphy's Law, was my backup drive with all vital current files.The last few months of work gone.Now the drive shows only the stuff I normally expect in / on any Linux machine. It mounts showing as ext4, but the disk was (I'm 98.5% sure) originally ext3.However, the installation did not finish.Whatever files got copied, clobbered only a fraction of the disk. df reports only 1% of the space used.Maybe the bulk of my valuable files are okay, and could be recovered with some tool?
There are other questions on this site about file recovery, but many are for Microsoft Windows, or for malfunctioning disks, or some other situation. I'm on Linux with a physically healthy external disk. I'm fairly sure that the more recent and more important files are in multiple copies on that disk, so if one copy is clobbered there's hope to get the second copy.
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Feb 21, 2011
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.
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Jul 7, 2010
I recently installed a few packages from source using checkinstall (notably x264). Today, when my normal synaptic/apt-get upgrade ran, it wanted to to overwrite the (newer) version I installed with the (older) version in the repos.Is there any way to have synaptic/apt ignore packages installed via checkinstall so that they aren't overwritten?
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Sep 28, 2010
I installes Ubunu on my Windows XP pro FD and I need to rcover some files , What is the best way tto recover them?
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Apr 21, 2011
I have been running a dual boot system with Windows XP and Ubuntu 10.10 64 bit with the dual boot selected by Grub (placed y an Ubuntu install).
Recently I have installed Window 7 Home on a spare disc. My Bios allows me to select which disc to boot.
The Win7 installation has overwritten the boot sector on the WinXP/Ubuntu dic so that it is now not bootable.
I can sse all my Ubuntu files with a Live Linux Disc, so I can get all my files back.
Is there any easy way to re-install Grub or should I just do a clean install of Ubuntu, perhaps to a blank partition?
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