Ubuntu :: Hard Drive Recovery - Destroying All My Data ?
May 22, 2010
I'm running 10.04 LTS (64 bit) During a recent attempt at dual booting Windows 7, the Windows installer made a boot partition on the wrong drive, formatting the drive, and therefore destroying all my data.
The original partition was NTFS, and the new (unwanted partition) is NTFS.
Is there something in Linux I can do to recover the data that was there, or am I going to have to install Windows on yet another drive and use some Windows tools?
The data on this drive is extraordinarily important, containing ten years of digital photos, my source codes, and musical compositions (protools sessions etc).
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Feb 22, 2010
I have an hp laptop with 2 hdd slots, both are sata. it came with a 320gb hdd with vista ultimate 64. i added another 320gb hard drive to my laptop and installed kubuntu on the second hard drive. Since vista was my primary hard drive, parts of grub were installed on it i.e. stage 1.5. And the rest was installed on the kubuntu hard drive. Because of that neither os would boot independently of one another.
I eventually got tired of kubuntu and in wanted to uninstall it. I formatted that disk. Now vista gave me grub errors, like I knew it would.I was going to fix the vista boot sector and mbr by running bootrec.exe off of the vista disc. But since I have an hp laptop, hp doesnt provide a recovery disc with just vista, it is an install of the factory image of the os plus software and therefore doesnt have the utilities I need to fix my problem.I ended up navigating to some sort of command line in the windows recovery environment and tried running it there, but no luck.
I tried navigating in the hp recovery environment, and accidently had vista start to reinstall itself on the drive, and actually I did that 3-4 times, each of which I stopped the recovery early on, within 30 seconds, but it had managed to mess up my partition table. I was wondering if there is some utilities in linux/ windows that will help me restore the partitions back the way they should be? I have done a data recovery with get data back for ntfs, and was pretty successful getting some stuff back, figures since the mft was screwed up.
So first of all I want to make an exact clone of the hard drive. Something like dd but just make an image file for now. Since there are no partitions on the drive I dont think I can use partimage, or drive image xml and I wonder if clonezilla will work. And I dont know how to test it without have to reload the image and wiping the drive in the process. I have imaged the drive with get data back but it does me no good cause I cannot restore that image back to the drive, or at least dont think I can.
Second I would like to see if I can recover the partition table , or mft that was over written. Here is a list of programs I can use for imaging or recovering. [URL]Third, since I have 2 320gb hard drives, one that is corrupted, and one that I took kubuntu off of and loaded vista with the recovery disks. Can I take the mbr, and partition table, or boot sector off of the working vista and move it to the broken 320 and fix it that way?
[URL]
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Mar 29, 2010
I have heard of a linux based data recovery for hard drives (corrupt) its bootable and once loaded and booted it will scan for drives and show there contents and let you pick and choose which ones you would like to back up/ save to a disk so you can wipe a drive and keep your info but I cannot remember the name of it.
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Jul 1, 2010
I am student of MCS and working on final project. I am the user of windows xp. I am new in Linux. I am working on a project that titles "Hard disk data Recovery of ext2 and ext3 in linux". In windows, including dos.h and bios.h header files in program of c language I can send interrupt to bios and access most of the devices like parallel port, hard disks etc. But problem is that there is no bios.h and dos.h files in gcc. Now how can I access my hard drive using c program. How can I call int13h interrupt in linux or there is any other function in the linux to access the hard disk. In fact I want to access sectors of my hard disk using c language program. How can I do it?
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Jul 10, 2010
Could I please have some recommendations for Data Recovery of a Formatted Drive. There are so many choices out there that I don't know which one I wanna use.
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May 5, 2010
The other day one of my hard drives on my windows system decided to stop working. Not entirely sure what happened, but it seemed that it just erased its partition header, although I wasn't able to recover it.
Anyway, I successfully got an image of the drive using GNU_ddrescue (yay!), and I'm currently salvaging what CAN be salvaged with foremost.
way to get EVERYTHING off of the drive? I mean, it seems that it's all intact (since foremost is finding so much stuff).
I've tried mounting the partition, but it's not working. (I'd post the output from the terminal, but the forum thinks there is/are URL(s) in it....)
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Jun 26, 2009
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.
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Feb 1, 2011
We have had a hardisk crash in our RAID1 webhosting server running CentOS5 and Plesk. We first realized something was wrong when our main site didn't load but showed MySQL errors. We then found out that the system was in read-only state. Something that also happened the day before yesterday, but we could fix with a FSCK. Then the system worked well til around 18 hours later when it crashed with the same sympoms. So, we rebooted the server and wanted to do a filesystem check again. But the HDD wouldnt even load. It was gone. Unfortunatelly it was not realized that the second disk in the system was also not working any more for some time now. Fortunatelly we had our main site backed up externally though. So we could re-install a fresh box and mounted the two drives to the system. We checked the harddisk. One is practically empty (the older one), the other has almost only files in 'lost + found' but these are all "numbered", no real filenames or so.
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Nov 1, 2010
I accidentally formatted a 2TB drive of mine (big oops), but have recovered 2 of the 3 partitions using testdisk. My third partition is a LUKS encrypted partition. Testdisk managed to recover a piece of it, but it won't mount as most of it is unallocated. The partition originally occupied all space from sector 2,930,272,065 to the end of the disk -- sector 3,907,024,064. That is about 473 GBs. Currently, the partition only uses space from sector 2,930,272,065 to 2,930,288,129, about 7.84 MB.
The rest of the space is unallocated. Now what I need to do, is to expand the partition so that it occupies all the space that it used to. How would I do this? I cannot resize the partition, cause it would try to recreate the filesystem AFAIK and I don't want that, as it will fry my data. My data is not terribly important, but I would rather have it then not. I attached a screenie of kpartitionmanager. The partition in question is /dev/sdb2.
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Sep 8, 2010
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.
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Aug 4, 2010
Recently I built a web server for my clients to host in house. After talking with the web developer they informed me that i needed a CentOS computer with Drupal for them to design the website. This is my first Linux install and after spending hours upon hours configuring the server with FTP, SSH, and configuring our DD-WRT router with proper port forwarding we turned it over to the web designers to start work on the website.
A month goes by and the website is almost done, at this point we go to make a full backup of the hard drive. Due to a hardware problem it fried the circuit board of the hard drive. After attempting to recover the files myself we opted to send it to a HD data recovery facility to recover the information. We have received back a DVD containing the 2GB's worth of data from the CentOS hard drive. It contained 2 folders one for each of the partitions. I can view and see all the files on my windows machine and it appears that all of the data was recovered successfully. I harbored some hope that i could simply reinstall CentOS with the same account information and then just drop the recovered files on top of the new installation and have it start working.
I then reinstalled CentOS on another hard drive in the same computer and used the same credentials for installation. After i successfully booting into CentOS i turned off the machine and connected the hard drive it to my Windows bench machine. After booting into Windows i was unable to browse the hard drive. After doing more research and installing Ext2fsd i was able to see the 2 partitions CentOS had just created, but only able to access the Boot partition. After more research i discovered the default installation of CentOS creates a Raw file type for the 2nd partition and that is why i am having issues reading it inside of Windows.
I then downloaded a copy of Knoppix to see if this would allow me to write the old files over the new ones. After booting up the CD i could only browse to the /boot drive(and im not even sure if this is Knoppix's Virtual /boot or my CentOS /boot).
My question is what would be the best steps to recovery for my scenario? Can the files be placed to the drive and have everything restored? Is the only way to recovery thru reinstalling all applications and reconfiguring from scratch? How difficult is Drupal DB to recover in this type of scenario?
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Dec 23, 2010
Mac Hard Drive Data Recovery is needed when your disks are not spinning up, hard drive unmountable, killed a hard drive without backing up, or if you have experienced a hard drive crash.
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Aug 9, 2011
I would like to build an oem style install partions that is bootable with menu to choose if I want to run install or boot already installed system. I would like to include current source packages on the same dive so if I don't have internet access at time of install, can can still install what I need.I know with Windows Vista and Windows 7, you can get this but how can I do this with Debian?
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Jul 4, 2010
I have recently gotten hold of a device that helps me plug my old ATA/IDE hard drive to my computer and view my old files that I wish to recover. I am using Ubuntu and the harddrive that I wish to retrieve the data from also has an Ubuntu install on it. The files I wish to recover are old .doc files, which I want to keep to remember my old writings.
The problem I have encountered arises when I wish to open some of the files. The icon for some of the files, which happen to be my best writings, has an X on the top right, indicating that I cannot view the contents. When I click on the files, the following error message pops up: "Access to /media/c885571b-a6e5-4a2d-937a-78af7050910/george/Courses/hist388/Passion.doc was denied."
Now, I am guessing that I need to be able to log in as superuser or something to be able to access these files, so I logged in my terminal as super user by following the instructions outlined on this page: [url]
I still did not have the sufficient access required to be able to open the files that I would like to retrieve.
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Sep 27, 2010
I have the strangest issue where my HDD reports full, but I can only account for about a tenth of the data.
Specs:
Ubuntu 10.4
laptop Toshiba Tecra A11
HDD 250GB
4Gb RAM
/home 20.3GB
/usr 2.4GB
/var 742MB
/lib 132.9MB
/opt 71.3 MB
/boot 15.4MB
/etc 14.2MB
sbin 7.4MB
bin 6.4MB
The rest are below a MB. This system is not a dual boot so 241Gb is ext4 and 8.9Gb is Extended and 8.9GB is Swap. This system has been loaded for about a month, when I initially loaded it there was 230GB free.
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Jul 28, 2011
So, I recently acquired a second hard drive (1.5 TB) and I wish to partition Ubuntu 11.04 with Windows 7. I've set everything up properly and using the Disk Utility in my System Settings I've created a 1 TB partition which I want to use for Linux. I think it has the proper partition type but how do I exactly go about transferring all my files from the hard drive I'm using now to the partition I would like to have?
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Apr 25, 2010
I am trying to transfer files from a SATA hard drive with Windows Vista (Home Premium) installed on it. Some files I can easily copy over, others just say Access Denied.
I'm sure permissions is part of the issue, unofrtunately Windows is unable to boot at all (surpise surprise) so I can't adjust anything from within in. I know with XP drives I can easily copy and paste onto my Ubuntu machine. I'm using a SATA to USB converter that let's me plug it in and my desktop reads it like an external hard drive.
I've gone into the properties and under permissions it shows my account as having access to Create and delete files under folder access amd "---" under File access. My group and others show None and --- for Folder and File access. I can post a link to a screenshot tomorrow. I've tried to also select Read and Write for File access but it goes back to the dashes before I can apply it.
I am running 64 bit Ubuntu 9.10 and do not have the sharing aspect installed. Any questions please feel free to ask me.
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May 24, 2010
Can not save data to external usb hard drive
formated and mounted on Ubuntu 9.10
visible on desktop /Dev/Sdb1
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May 28, 2010
I should have seen this coming when I lost the ability to boot windows, or mount that drive from ubuntu. But now I think my hard drive has failed. Is there any way to retrieve the data from the hard drive, or my settings and the like for ubuntu? I'm at a loss for what to do as i'm booting from a CD right now =X.
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Aug 11, 2010
I just want one last attempt at seeing if there's a solution. My Dell Studio 15 laptop HDD that runs Vista failed, I booted Ubuntu from a CD knowing that I should be able to recover my data.
However, Ubuntu can't find my HDD, it's not listed and "fdisk -l" doesn't result in anything. The BIOS seems to know that the HDD is there though.
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Aug 30, 2010
i have a 200gb hard drive and im upgrading to a 1tb hard drive and i want all my stuff like settings and files on my new hard drive whats the best and easiest way to transfer all my stuff from the old hard drive to the new one
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Mar 24, 2011
I have a friend that has a computer running UBUNTU he has not used in a while and has forgotten the user name and password for it. Is there away to retrieve the data from this hard drive?
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Apr 5, 2011
I'm trying to make a simple task as complicated as possible, so bear with me.
I'm going to force a friend onto Ubuntu soon, and the biggest requirement is photo management.
He wants his extensive photo library backed up, and backed up some more, and then when all feels safe, backed up even again.
Currently, all his photos reside on a 4 disk striped RAID array, based on his cousin's recommendation. The intent was a RAID 1+0, but they failed, and that needs to be fixed immediately.
So, instead of going with more mirrored hard drives in a RAID, which I know Ubuntu will do just fine, I'd like to simplify and just do manual backups of each hard drive.
So, I'm looking for a program that could possibly be set up to automatically back up a hard drive onto another hard drive on a weekly basis or something like that. Ultimately, doing a manual copy/paste of the data in the drive could work, but would be time consuming.
I'm scared of RAIDs lately because of a recent fiasco with a BIOSTAR motherboard and how it set the RAID mirror on a set of hard drives for a Windows load that rendered the harddrives basically useless for anything but a RAID mirror, with that motherboard and a Windows load, and I almost lost a lot of data because of it.
I'm also not sure how well Windows would recognize a RAID partition created in ext3, if he ever wanted to go back to Windows.
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Jun 20, 2011
My servers (10.10) motherboard has failed so to access my data I've taken the hard drive out and tried to connect to it via my ubuntu desktop (10.10). I've tried it in a hard drive caddy and installed in my pc, but could only see a 255Mb Filesystem with a few folders and files on it. how to mount the portion of the disk that I can't see? Ie. the part with all of the data on it.
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Oct 3, 2009
Im using rhl 5 on my new hard drive,i want to transfer data from my older hardrive (which has windows xp installed,one partition has fat32 and another has ntfs filesystem) to the new hardrive...
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Jul 19, 2010
I have a Seagate 1TB external USB 2.0 hard disk which contains 740 GB of data. Everytime I connect, it shows the memory occupied and the remaining memory(190GB)..but when i try to access the folders inside they read empty... nothing is seen in the folders.. I am unable to read any data from it or write to it... Same is the case with Windows When I run self-test in Linux ubuntu I get
Reallocated sector count
threshold: 36
Normalized: 61
Worst: 61
value: 6488
Current pending sector count:
Normalized:1
threshold: 0
worst: 1
value:2036
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Oct 4, 2010
My friend just got a gaming laptop that he won't let anyone else use (his last one got infected when his girlfriend surfed on it for just one hour -- he refuses to use antivirus since he claims he knows how to keep clean, but he doesn't trust others).
Because I used Linux a bit once, I said to him what if I could promise not to make any changes to your hard drive, and I told him that I was pretty sure I could boot to a live cd and then only write files to a usb key. He's actually willing to let me try (I showed him some linux sites I was looking at, and he believes me that we can do this).
1) Is there anything I either MUST do or else must NOT do to make sure I make no changes to his laptop's hard drive? And so that any changes are only going to go on the usb drive I hook up?
2) Since he's got an i7 processor, I assume I should get a version of ubuntu that supports 64 bits, right?
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Oct 4, 2010
OK, was trying to make a live-usb boot partition on my 1.5TB HD; in doing so clicked a 'wipe disk' button.
A second later I realised what I'd done, clicked cancel (frantically), tried to unmount the drive but was told 'volume busy'. In a panic, unplugged the drive. Unsurprisingly, the drive is now a mess.
I'd had 1 30G FAT32 partition (empty) at sdd1, 1 1.5TB ext4 partition with about 500G of data at sdd2. Now according to gparted I have an unrecognised filesystem type; according to the 'Disk Utility' I have an unmountable 1.5TB FAT32 drive.
I know NOTHING about data recovery. If it's just a case of running a couple of magic 'check & fix' programs then I should be OK, but anything else and I'll have to take it to more skilled friends.
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Apr 6, 2011
I was trying to fix some hardware on my laptop and i ended up mucking the whole thing up. The HDD seems to fine though. I have it in a external HDD enclosure and it's plugged into my mothers desktop through usb.I'm trying to print some files I have, but my home directory on the external HDD is encrypted.
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Apr 10, 2011
So this is a two part question. My laptop came preinstalled with windows 7, I wanted ubuntu but needed windows to update my zune so I have both operating systems on my laptop. I only used windows for my zune, that was its sole purpose, now my zune is broken and I no longer need windows at all.
First, I downloaded about 20gb of music off of my zune and onto my windows partition, is there any way to transfer files like these from one partition to another? I don't know if that makes sense.
Second, can I unpartition my hard drive so it is purely ubuntu ** without losing all my ubuntu files and stuff **? If that wasn't clear, I want my laptop to just have ubuntu, I want the 40-some gb that I dedicated to windows back for ubuntu, and I don't want to lose all my files, settings, etc. that I already have on my ubuntu partition. Can this be done?
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