Recently (and for ages, I'm sure) folks have suffered partition destruction and had to try and recover. In the recent thread, the victim eventually had to resort to Google and fond some package that I can not remember now.
Well, I was perusing my YumInfo.lst.05, for general info, and I discovered this (potential) little gem. Thought I would pass it on and make it "more googleable" by adding a few keywords at the end of this. Here's the info summary.
Name : testdisk Arch : i386 Version: 6.3 Release: 1.el4.kb Size : 480 k Repo : kbs-CentOS-Extras Summary: Tool to check and undelete partition Description: Tool to check and undelete partition. Works with FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, BeFS, CramFS, HFS, JFS, Linux Raid, Linux Swap, LVM, LVM2, NSS, ReiserFS, UFS, XFS
I hope it actually "looks for file-system key stuff" instead of just examining the damaged blocks (often just missing the 0x05 (?) valid flag). If so, it looks "Mahvelous Dahling!" to me. We just need to get some time to exercise this, create some test cases and find out how really good it is. As time permits, I'll do some of that, as I'm reconfig bunch of stuff all the time and have some old small disks (and systems to match that I can resurrect... Windows95 from Genuine floppies anybody?) and the interest. I'll add to this thread as things are discovered.
Anyone who has done this already, or has firsthand experience, can allow me to continue my on-going learning of new stuff by reporting on this package so I don't invest the time to evaluate this properly.
This is just a bunch of searchable words, feel free to augment as appropriate in your POV.
MBR, master, boot, recover, restore, lost, damaged, unerase.
On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 15:13 -0400, William L. Maltby wrote:
Recently (and for ages, I'm sure) folks have suffered partition destruction and had to try and recover. In the recent thread, the victim eventually had to resort to Google and fond some package that I can not remember now.
Well, I was perusing my YumInfo.lst.05, for general info, and I discovered this (potential) little gem. Thought I would pass it on and make it "more googleable" by adding a few keywords at the end of this. Here's the info summary.
Name : testdisk Arch : i386 Version: 6.3 Release: 1.el4.kb Size : 480 k Repo : kbs-CentOS-Extras Summary: Tool to check and undelete partition Description: Tool to check and undelete partition. Works with FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, BeFS, CramFS, HFS, JFS, Linux Raid, Linux Swap, LVM, LVM2, NSS, ReiserFS, UFS, XFS
I hope it actually "looks for file-system key stuff" instead of just examining the damaged blocks (often just missing the 0x05 (?) valid flag). If so, it looks "Mahvelous Dahling!" to me. We just need to get some time to exercise this, create some test cases and find out how really good it is. As time permits, I'll do some of that, as I'm reconfig bunch of stuff all the time and have some old small disks (and systems to match that I can resurrect... Windows95 from Genuine floppies anybody?) and the interest. I'll add to this thread as things are discovered.
Anyone who has done this already, or has firsthand experience, can allow me to continue my on-going learning of new stuff by reporting on this package so I don't invest the time to evaluate this properly.
This is just a bunch of searchable words, feel free to augment as appropriate in your POV.
MBR, master, boot, recover, restore, lost, damaged, unerase.
If this tool does good stuff, post the results here and I will include testdisk on the CentOS-4.4 Live CD when it is built.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 14:52 -0500, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 15:13 -0400, William L. Maltby wrote:
Recently (and for ages, I'm sure) folks have suffered partition destruction and had to try and recover. In the recent thread, the victim eventually had to resort to Google and fond some package that I can not remember now.
Well, I was perusing my YumInfo.lst.05, for general info, and I discovered this (potential) little gem. Thought I would pass it on and make it "more googleable" by adding a few keywords at the end of this. Here's the info summary.
Name : testdisk
<snip>
Summary: Tool to check and undelete partition Description: Tool to check and undelete partition. Works with FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, BeFS, CramFS, HFS, JFS, Linux Raid, Linux Swap, LVM, LVM2, NSS, ReiserFS, UFS, XFS
I hope it actually "looks for file-system key stuff" instead of just examining the damaged blocks (often just missing the 0x05 (?) valid flag). If so, it looks "Mahvelous Dahling!" to me. We just need to get some time to exercise this, create some test cases and find out how really good it is. <snip>
If this tool does good stuff, post the results here and I will include testdisk on the CentOS-4.4 Live CD when it is built.
Will do. Patience is keyword. As you know I am learning anew *many* things. I'll slot this in somewhere soon.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
<snip sig stuff>
On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 15:58 -0400, William L. Maltby wrote:
On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 14:52 -0500, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 15:13 -0400, William L. Maltby wrote:
Recently (and for ages, I'm sure) folks have suffered partition destruction C<snip>
Name : testdisk
<snip>
Summary: Tool to check and undelete partition
<snip>
While learning more to prep meself for immunity to test fubars, saw a phrase in sfdisk man page about not dealing well with large disks. Hmmm. And I love sfdisk. Oh well, guess I'll look at parted, in which I never had an interest. Found this reference, and thought I'd pass it on. I have *not* read anything on it yet, but wanted to get it out here in case some folks have time and interest to look at it.
Name : gpart Arch : i386 Version: 0.1 Release: 1.h.2.el4.rf Size : 41 k Repo : dries Summary: Guesses and recovers a damaged MBR (Master Boot Record) Description: Gpart is a small tool which tries to guess what partitions are on a PC type harddisk in case the primary partition table was damaged.
Since the repo is dries, that means rpmforge, IIRC.
BTW, while setting up to be able set BIOS to boot from any hard drive I desire (a sound fall-back position in my experience) so I can test with testdisk, I had to learn a little more than the rudiments of LVM and grub (I *told* you stuff had passed me by - I *want* my LILO! :-). Anyway, to do that successfully using LVM *seems* to require a change to the initial ram disk (unless I'm missing some "jiggery-pokery" that allows two Volume Groups on different PVs to have the same name while I'm building # 2 and copying stuff to it?). If no one stops me by a "... you don't need to do it that way..." posting, I'll write a short note on it later on.
Johnny Hughes spake the following on 6/17/2006 12:52 PM:
On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 15:13 -0400, William L. Maltby wrote:
Recently (and for ages, I'm sure) folks have suffered partition destruction and had to try and recover. In the recent thread, the victim eventually had to resort to Google and fond some package that I can not remember now.
Well, I was perusing my YumInfo.lst.05, for general info, and I discovered this (potential) little gem. Thought I would pass it on and make it "more googleable" by adding a few keywords at the end of this. Here's the info summary.
Name : testdisk Arch : i386 Version: 6.3 Release: 1.el4.kb Size : 480 k Repo : kbs-CentOS-Extras Summary: Tool to check and undelete partition Description: Tool to check and undelete partition. Works with FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, BeFS, CramFS, HFS, JFS, Linux Raid, Linux Swap, LVM, LVM2, NSS, ReiserFS, UFS, XFS
I hope it actually "looks for file-system key stuff" instead of just examining the damaged blocks (often just missing the 0x05 (?) valid flag). If so, it looks "Mahvelous Dahling!" to me. We just need to get some time to exercise this, create some test cases and find out how really good it is. As time permits, I'll do some of that, as I'm reconfig bunch of stuff all the time and have some old small disks (and systems to match that I can resurrect... Windows95 from Genuine floppies anybody?) and the interest. I'll add to this thread as things are discovered.
Anyone who has done this already, or has firsthand experience, can allow me to continue my on-going learning of new stuff by reporting on this package so I don't invest the time to evaluate this properly.
This is just a bunch of searchable words, feel free to augment as appropriate in your POV.
MBR, master, boot, recover, restore, lost, damaged, unerase.
If this tool does good stuff, post the results here and I will include testdisk on the CentOS-4.4 Live CD when it is built.
I have used it a time or two, and was fairly impressed. It is a useful tool and should be in the live CD. It is on many other rescue CD's.
On 17/06/06, William L. Maltby BillsCentOS@triad.rr.com wrote:
Name : testdisk Arch : i386 Version: 6.3 Release: 1.el4.kb Size : 480 k Repo : kbs-CentOS-Extras Summary: Tool to check and undelete partition Description: Tool to check and undelete partition. Works with FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, BeFS, CramFS, HFS, JFS, Linux Raid, Linux Swap, LVM, LVM2, NSS, ReiserFS, UFS, XFS
MBR, master, boot, recover, restore, lost, damaged, unerase.
FWIW it (and Photorec) got the NTK seal of approval...
http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02006-06-09&l=116#l
Will.
On Sun, 2006-06-18 at 03:31 +0100, Will McDonald wrote:
On 17/06/06, William L. Maltby BillsCentOS@triad.rr.com wrote:
Name : testdisk Arch : i386
BTW, just occurred to me: other arch's have issues? Have easy ways to recover? Is there commonality between HD mapping such that *some* other archs could benefit from a port or extension to the software (assuming it's decent to start with)? Maybe insufficient number of potential beneficiaries?
<snip>
Tool to check and undelete partition. Works with FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, BeFS, CramFS, HFS, JFS, Linux Raid, Linux Swap, LVM, LVM2, NSS, ReiserFS, UFS, XFS
MBR, master, boot, recover, restore, lost, damaged, unerase.
FWIW it (and Photorec) got the NTK seal of approval...
It's *always* appreciated when one takes the time to contribute, IMO. I thank you.
Yep. Unfortunately, it sounds a whole lot like they just appreciated that someone made the effort. They didn't mention (much less offer links to) any evaluation's results. So, I still think some investigation & testing is warranted. And, since I have written software to do exactly this sort of thing (in the *looooooong*-ago past) and have more recent experience related to automated install/recovery, I have some "fuzzy" ideas about what I hope it's doing. I also have an *excellent* record (in my past life) of breaking things through maximum use in unexpected, but totally "legal-per-the-docs", manners (mostly IBM S-360/370 mainframe and early UNIX - PWB V6/7) software.
Unfortunately, it was usually unintentional. I can't be sure how effective I'd be at doing it on purpose! :-)
As mentioned in my earlier, IG2IASARUSEBM2I (I'll Get To It As Soon As Reasonable Unless Someone Else Beats Me To It- my contribution of "Obfuscating Venue-specific Acronyms" - OVA) >:-O
Hmmm. Maybe I better drink another coffee before reading the rest of Sunday morning's mail.
Will.
<snip sig stuff>
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Johnny Hughes -
Scott Silva -
Will McDonald -
William L. Maltby