[ale] Fwd: Hard Drive Death Spiral -- AKA Recovery Software?

[Brian Pitts]

On Thu, 2008-12-11 at 16:15 -0500, H P Ladds wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 1:53 PM, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > The first thing you need / want to do is make a full copy (image) of the drive.
> 
> Done
> 
> > You can use gpart to guess / rebuild your partition table.
> 
> Really? do I need to do this? It is one partition (sda5) that is
> causing trouble. Before I screwed it up it was formated as ext3.

If you know where your partitions begin and end be you can recreate a
borked partition table manually. If you're not sure, try Testdisk

"TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily
designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks
bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software,
certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a
Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really
easy.

TestDisk can

      * Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
      * Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
      * Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector
      * Fix FAT tables
      * Rebuild NTFS boot sector
      * Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup
      * Fix MFT using MFT mirror
      * Locate ext2/ext3 Backup SuperBlock
      * Undelete files from FAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem
      * Copy files from deleted FAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3 partitions."

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

-Brian