Hard Drive Recovery

[monte48lowes]

I went on vacation and came home to find my media partition was corrupted. It was formatted FAT32 so I could access the files from winXP and kubuntu. I could not access the drive due to the severe errors on the disk. I searched far and wide across the net for a free linux solution with the only results being dd or ddrescue. I had a small problem with both of these programs... the hard disc I needed to recover was 76GB and the largest free partition that was left working was 56GB. So I kept searching.... no luck.

I got the drive working using as many free tools as possible. However my files were still missing. I went down the path of finding a program I had to pay for. So I did. Unfortunately the program I used did not recover all of the files, only the first 10 - 15% of each file. The thumbnail looked fine, however when the photo was opened only a strip at the top was recovered.

Then I found a free program and was able to recover 95% of my families pictures. It did not preserve the file names or directory structure, but I now have the photos!!

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

There are versions for win, mac, linux, dos. IT IS COMMAND LINE BASED. Just to warn those afraid of the command line.

Mike

[Rog131]

Re: Hard Drive Recovery

Then I found a free program and was able to recover 95% of my families pictures. It did not preserve the file names or directory structure, but I now have the photos!!

Good to hear

I have tried ddrescue (to ext and fat partitions):
HOWTO: Rescue data from hard disk
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=11236.0

There is also kdiskrescue:
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=49081

Description:
KDiskRescue is a KDE frontent to the gnu program ddrescue.

It's written with korundum, the qt/kde ruby bindings. So it depends to korundum and ddrescue.

It's still an alpha, so expect issues and report them if you can. Illustrations are alpha too