I got a problem dropped in my lap..
A friend has a laptop where the 60GB harddrive was split in two partitions. One for WindowsXP and one for data. He decided to reinstall Windows as the laptop was acting weird and wanted to format the OS partition. In the middle of this, the laptop crashed. And now both partitions are dead.
I have a Windows tool for trying to recover files (a heavier one than most of the free stuff) and using a raw recover, it can see the files, but that is as far as I get with it. So I am turning to Linux instead.
On my own laptop, I am running Kubuntu 9.04 beta (very happy with it) and I have enough space to store the image. I have a USB kit that I can use to attach the bad harddrive to my laptop.
What is the best software to make the image? This is not a strictly forensic situation, but I really want to make an image of absolutely every bit on the harddrive so I can use some other tool to try to extract the files. The most important files are pictures and mail.
OBS - As soon as I have an image of the harddrive, it will be formatted and Kubuntu 9.04 beta will be installed. No more Windows on that laptop!
For this situation, I do not mind using CLI. I have no need to watch the grass grow. It is nice though to have a little progress report so at least I know how far into the process the program is.
I do not need to care about partitions. I just need the whole harddrive into one image. So I guess the commands can be kept fairly simple.
Then again - if you know of a nice GUI tool that is updated and actually work with KDE, I am all ears :-)
I have heard of dcfldd and tried to find some examples of how to do a simple image of a whole harddrive. But no luck after a lot of searching. As I am not and English native and have no experience in this area of Linux, maybe I did not search for the right thing...
Have you done anything like this?
A friend has a laptop where the 60GB harddrive was split in two partitions. One for WindowsXP and one for data. He decided to reinstall Windows as the laptop was acting weird and wanted to format the OS partition. In the middle of this, the laptop crashed. And now both partitions are dead.
I have a Windows tool for trying to recover files (a heavier one than most of the free stuff) and using a raw recover, it can see the files, but that is as far as I get with it. So I am turning to Linux instead.
On my own laptop, I am running Kubuntu 9.04 beta (very happy with it) and I have enough space to store the image. I have a USB kit that I can use to attach the bad harddrive to my laptop.
What is the best software to make the image? This is not a strictly forensic situation, but I really want to make an image of absolutely every bit on the harddrive so I can use some other tool to try to extract the files. The most important files are pictures and mail.
OBS - As soon as I have an image of the harddrive, it will be formatted and Kubuntu 9.04 beta will be installed. No more Windows on that laptop!
For this situation, I do not mind using CLI. I have no need to watch the grass grow. It is nice though to have a little progress report so at least I know how far into the process the program is.
I do not need to care about partitions. I just need the whole harddrive into one image. So I guess the commands can be kept fairly simple.
Then again - if you know of a nice GUI tool that is updated and actually work with KDE, I am all ears :-)
I have heard of dcfldd and tried to find some examples of how to do a simple image of a whole harddrive. But no luck after a lot of searching. As I am not and English native and have no experience in this area of Linux, maybe I did not search for the right thing...
Have you done anything like this?
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