

Ask HN: Help with Hard Disk Recovery? - revorad

Hi guys, I'm sorry this is a bit of a selfish thing to post on HN, but I desperately need some help.<p>I blew up my hard disk last night. I booted my Dell inspiron laptop with the Asus eee pc recovery DVD by mistake. It launched straight into an install. I realised within 5 secs and powered down. Apparently, that was enough to hose the hard drive and it wouldn't boot (I had a dual install WinXP/Ubuntu with grub). I booted with an old cd to get a dos prompt and tried fdisk/mbr but that didn't work either.<p>Googling around brings up loads of shady looking shareware software.<p>Does anyone know of a good solid software to retrieve lost partitions/data?*<p>Thanks.<p>*If not, maybe there's a business idea right there :p
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RobGR
First, go out and get a USB disk bigger than the laptop disk, and use a live
CD to copy a disk image of the laptop to the USB. That way you can experiement
and write the original back if it doesn't work.

If you had a dual install, the Ubuntu partition may not have been touched yet.
However the partition table itself may have been overwritten. There is a free
software tool called "gpart" that guesses the correct partition table based on
the data on the disk, it may get you half way there, in that you can mount the
linux part of things.

For the windows part of things, the Asus CD probably started writing near the
start of the partition, so you won't be able to reconstruct that. Lucky for
you, all the user data is probably back a bit in the partition. I think I
would try the tool "foremost" which is free software from the US Air Force's
Forensic labs, to try to recover the windows files (and the linux, if gpart
did not get you to a mountable partition).

As for your business idea in retrieving lost partitions and data, it has been
done, but I'd like to suggest a better business idea: backups.

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revorad
Thanks a lot. Your first idea is very good, I hadn't thought of doing that.

I will also try gpart and foremost.

I thought backups as a business is probably already done well, so I thought
recovery would be good. I suppose backups for individuals would still be a
good idea. But I'd think there are still quite a few people who lose data the
way I have and there just doesn't seem to be a good straightforward solution.
None of the ones suggested here appeared on google.

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phantom784
I've had luck with the open-source PhotoRec before. It scans a storage device
for bits that match known file types (and it knows a lot, not just photo types
as the name implies), and saves them to a new location. I'd definitely give it
a try before paying for expensive data-recovery.

~~~
revorad
Thanks, that looks good too. I hope it works!

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khafra
The gold standard is forensic software like EnCase, FTK, or--if you're broke--
ProDiscover. It'll take some work, but if the bits are still on the drive,
they'll get them. Each suite has varying levels of expertise at reconstructing
folders and files.

~~~
revorad
Thanks, I didn't know about those.

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ErrantX
licenses for them are insanely expensive :) but worth it.

Encase is the best bet - it will recover all of the files into something
resembling a directory structure.

Best to go to a pro firm: £100-200 is a fair price to dump all your files to
another drive.

~~~
revorad
Yeah those license prices are way beyond my reach. Hiring a pro firm seems a
much better option. But I might tinker around a bit before shelling out couple
hundred bucks.

Thanks for the tip anyway.

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ErrantX
where are you located and what stuff needs recovering? It's a million to one
your near us but I might know a company in your area that's decent.

~~~
revorad
I'm in London. I mainly need to recover some files (all sorts - mdb,xls,txt
etc) on my Windows XP partition.

Thanks a lot for your help, really appreciate it.

edit: just saw your uk email id in your profile.

~~~
ErrantX
drop me a line on my email if you want, were quite a way up north but I might
be able to help

~~~
revorad
Thanks Tom. I saw your website - looks like you're just the expert I need to
talk to! I'll drop you a line. Cheers.

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sho
Wow, the CD commences install without any confirmation whatsoever!? What
terrible design!

~~~
revorad
well it did ask something cryptic, i didn't realise it was asking to erase
everything. it is terrible design i agree.

