Using Fedora 16 to pull files off a malfunctioning hard drive?

[Doug G]

dd makes an image copy of a partition similar to ghost in windows, but if you do a dd image you won't be able to get individual files from the backup until you mount the image.

If you use cp make sure you use the correct options to recursively copy directories.

From the command line, once your usb backup hard drive and the windows partition on the original hard drive are mounted you can use cp, tar, rsync, whatever to copy the desired files from the oringinal drive to the backup drive.

One note, I don't know how or if you can copy the windows permissions on files to your backup unless you do a complete dd image of the ntfs partition.

[Catharlex]

Are there any live media versions of Linux that come with dd_rescue by default? I ran across this in my search. Has anyone used this in the past?

[Dan]

This is an interesting tool. Hirens BootCD




And some others:

Gparted LiveCD

SystemRescueCD

[DBelton]

I have used hirens boot cd for years and it's an excellent tool to keep around for emergencies. He used to put a lot more tools on the cd images, but I think the piracy police caught up with him, so now he offers less, but with ways to add applications to the cd if you have them.

Even without all of the "proprietary" tools that used to be on there, it's still a great recovery cd. You can boot a full linux system (or even a full Windows XP system) and run just about anything you want to, or most of the best disk utilities are the ones run from the dos command line.

[Penguinclaw]

I'm not a recovery expert but I have managed to solve problems in the past with Knoppix and/or system rescue. In fact I swear by System rescue and use it frequently to setup partitioning on hard-drives. If you find there is data that is "lost" on the hard-drive try photrec a very handy utility that I have used to recover very important data from corrupted drives. I believe it is available by default on both Linux distros I've recomended.

[Catharlex]

I'm posting from my phone so forgive my lack of formatting..

I'm using hiren's bootcd... I've found the local disk but it has nothing listed on total size or free space. When I access the disk it asks me if I want to format the disk. This appears to me as if his hard drive is completely gone correct?

[Dan]

No! 'tain't necessarily so!

Try the partition recovery tools first. Particularly testdisk.

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=278865

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

It's on hiren's, in the linux recovery tools as I recall, but I ran it from the Gparted liveCD. It's on Hiren's here:

Parted Magic 6.7 Linux based rescue environment with lots of applications to manage partitions, backup and recovery such as GParted, Parted, Partition Image, TestDisk, Partimage, Truecrypt, Clonezilla, G4L, Firefox, ClamAV, GSmartControl, SimpleBurn, dd, ddrescue, with extensive collection of file system tools are also included, supports the following: btrfs, ext2, ext3, ext4, fat16, fat32, hfs, hfs+, jfs, linux-swap, ntfs, reiserfs, reiser4, and xfs.

Here's the step-by-step constructions.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step