Re: [opensuse] Is there a way to read data from a hdd, with a worm eaten bootsector?

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The Monday 2008-06-30 at 08:23 -0400, James Knott wrote:

> The problem with Spinrite is that it attempts to repair the drive, > rather than copy the data to another drive. This means if it messes up, > you've lost everything. It's far safer to copy the drive contents to > another drive and work on recovery there.
>
That would mean that i could access the drive, to copy the data....

And how is it possible to be able to access a drive well enough to repair, but not be able to copy the sectors to another drive? A few years ago, there was a presentation on disk recovery, at the Toronto Linux Users Group, by someone who does that professionally. He said utilities such as Spinright can often cause more problems than they fix. He also said the standard procedure in his work is to copy as much as possible from the old drive and then work with the copy, rather than attempt to fix the original.

Absolutely. It is the safest method.

An image of the data can be obtained with dd, if there are no damaged sectors, or dd_rescue if there are. Once the image is obtained, work on it. If there are no damaged sectors, the procedure can later be applied to the disk, too.

However, in this case the image is large, and there is the possibility that only the partition table and/or boot sectors were damaged (erased or overwritten), and could be easily recovered. It shouldn't be very difficult to undo that damage.

- -- Cheers,
Carlos E. R.

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