[PLUG-TALK] data recovery

glen e. p. ropella gepr at tempusdictum.com
Fri Jun 3 14:39:45 UTC 2005


So, I'm so relieved that I can't work at the moment and I have
nobody to share my story with... So, I'm going to waste a little of
your bandwidth. [grin]

Yesterday, I was feeling all good about myself because I finished
a simulation and got some reasonable (heuristic) results for
my client after a long, focussed effort on getting those results.
I felt good.

So, I decided to spend some of this emotional "capital" (much like
our evil President claiming to spend some of his illusory political
capital after the last election) and take the final leap in retiring
my dying linux server here at home.  That final leap consisting of
_merely_ moving my one big (new) IDE disk from the old server into
my newly acquired machine.  All I had to do was install it and
set it up to mount automatically at boot and I'd be _done_.

Well, nothing's ever easy, eh?  So, I'd forgotten that on PC platforms
IDE's take priority over SCSI disks.  And the new server only uses
SCSI disks... So, when I installed the disk, it wouldn't boot.
Some of my emotional capital had been spent.  But, I was still in
the black; so, having recently fought with Grub, RAID, and all the
other minor daemons you have to vanquish in order to get Debian
running nicely on a new machine, I launched right into modifying
my setup.

I'm a "trial-and-error" guy... And somewhere in all the futzing,
I passed from the black (emotional capital) into the red.  At
that point, I decided to give the old RAID JBOD config a try to
see if I could order the disks differently or something.... It's
not real clear what I was thinking, if I was thinking at all. [grin]

Well, that wiped the partition table from all my disks, IDE and
SCSI alike.  Of course, I didn't realize that, yet.  I just decided
to give up, eat dinner, and watch "Attack of the Show".  But,
I decided to put the IDE disk back into the old server so that
I could do revenue-generating work in the morning....

Lo and behold, there were no mountable partitions on my disk...
that has all my work data on it.  Ack!  I was screwed.  And I
hadn't made a backup in quite awhile.  Oh, sure, I use faubackup
to move data amongst partitions and disks; but, one of the partitions
on this drive _was_ my backup.  I just never thought I would be
so stupid as to pooch a _whole_ disk drive.

So, to finish out the story, I spent about 6 hours last night using
the Linux Disk Editor (lde.sourceforge.net), gpart, and several other
tools in an attempt to recover my data.  It was all there, buried
in the stupid little ascii rendition of the hex dumps.

This morning, I could think a little clearer, but still didn't know
how to just re-construct the partition table without manipulating
the rest of the disk.  (I didn't know the precise data from which
to construct the partition table from scratch.)

Then I decided, on a lark, to try TestDisk <http://www.cgsecurity.org/>.
It worked right out of the box... first try... no hassle... I didn't
really even have to read the instructions.  Sheesh.

So, after donating $100 to that guy, I'm finally back to zero
emotional capital.

Thanks for your time ...
-- 
glen e. p. ropella              =><=                           Hail Eris!
H: 503.630.4505                              http://www.ropella.net/~gepr
M: 971.219.3846                               http://www.tempusdictum.com



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