Another weekend and some more data recovery
This weekend:
- I became a year older — boo. I got some lovely presents — yay!
- My son smiled at me for the first time — yay!
- I was able to find an O2 shop that had a 16GB iPhone in stock — yay!
- I set up my Dad’s new PC, and it seems to work — yay!
- I was able to recover his data from his old broken disk — yay!
- I took an extra day off (today!) to spend more time with my family — yay!
So, all in all, pretty damn funky weekend.
The data recovery was achieved in the end by booting a ‘backup‘ Windows 2000 ISO on QEMU, and then buying R-Studio Data Recovery and running that on the data. A bit of a disappointment, but I ran out of time either rolling my own or getting either ScroungeNTFS or testdisk to work.
As I write this I’m now waiting for a 150GB file copy from the virtual disk to a cleanly formatted 1TB drive to give to my Dad. Because I’m an idiot, I originally recovered the data onto the virtual disk, and not the final destination.
To add extra fun, rather than copy the data out somehow from the virtual booted Windows 2000, I’m copying using:
- A network block device server to read the data block-by-block from the virtual disk.
- The network block device client mounting that image as
/dev/nbd0. kpartxto get the partition out from the raw block device as/dev/mapper/nbd0p1.- Finally, mounting
/dev/mapper/nbd0p1as an NTFS disk (natively in Linux), and copying using nautilus. (Though Malc points out rsync might have been a better choice.)
Posted at 22:20:00 BST on 18th August 2008.
NTFS data recovery on Linux
My Dad’s PC hard disk died at the weekend. Well, as far as I can tell, the hard disk is fine, but the boot sector and master file table of the NTFS filesystem on it are broken. Windows doesn’t recognise it as an NTFS file system.
As my main PC is now an Ubuntu Linux box, I’m in a bit of trouble recovering the data. Certainly the NTFS file system drivers for Linux have as much trouble as Windows in recognising the data.
After an awful lot of playing with dd and Googling about, I found that the boot sector
of the partition had been hosed. Luckily, there’s a backup copy of the boot sector.
Some documentation says it’s at the end of the partition, but I found it at
the centre. A bit of bash shell maths later and I had the bootsector dded
out.
I transplanted the backup back in the first sector of the disk…and…the NTFS drivers
recognise it as an NTFS partition! Yay! But boo…the MFT is corrupt. I tried
CHKDSK on Windows, but that says the same thing. Even though there’s supposedly a backup to the
MFT on the disk somewhere too (I’ve yet to find it).
Latterly I found Scrounge NTFS, which compiled cleanly, and was able to read the MFT, and some file data too.
However, it doesn’t seem to work 100% reliably. It faulted out halfway through (on the PAGEFILE.SYS on the
drive). Additionally, it doesn’t support compressed files.
Looks like I should be able to coerce it into working though, with a bit of hackery. But first I need to get some spare disk space to try it out in. I’ll post if and when I get the data off…and whether I have to resort to some payware Windows tools in the end!
Filed under: Blog
Posted at 11:30:00 BST on 12th August 2008.
A good weekend
A short post this, more of a twitter-style entry. I’ve had a great weekend:
- I’ve had tons of time to spend with my lovely baby son. He’s 7lb 12oz now, so I’m a very happy Daddy.
- I’ve rewired my house’s ADSL and ethernet setup. My modem is now in the lounge instead of in a cupboard upstairs. I re-used the cable that used to connect the master phone socket in the lounge to the cupboard as an Ethernet cable. In the process I learnt that Ethernet only uses two twisted pairs out of the 8 that are in CAT5 — just as well as the dodgy cable the BT engineer installed only had three twisted pairs in it.
- I’ve taken three carloads of crap harvested from the loft to the dump. I’ve boarded out a load more loft giving
me even more storage space. It’s now ready to consign even more stuff to a prolonged attic purgatory.
In doing so I managed to bring xania.org down (which lives in a corner up there).
The downtime was due to me accidentally unplugging it to power in a drill, exacerbated by the stupid BIOS which requires a keyboard
to be plugged in to be able to boot — else it says “
Keyboard error - hit F1 to continue” (I kid you not!)
Lots of cool things to look forward to at work this week too.
Filed under: Blog
Posted at 22:44:04 BST on 3rd August 2008.
William Anthony Richard Godbolt
It has been rather a busy few weeks for us! As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, my wife Ness and I were expecting our first child in mid July.
However, on the 12th of June, 2008, William Anthony Richard Godbolt was born. He was a few weeks early and weighed only 1.88kg (4lb 2oz), but he breathed unassisted straight away and has been feeding brilliantly. He’s already nearly 2kg, and shows no sign of stopping!
We’d like to thank all our family and friends for their help, well wishes and lent and donated baby things. William’s early arrival was such a surprise for us we were caught somewhat off-guard — so especial thanks to our parents and siblings for buying up half of Mothercare on our behalf!
William gets some early coding in.
Ness and I are absolutely over the moon, and are enjoying every moment we are spending getting to know our new son! More pictures here.
Filed under: Blog
Posted at 18:30:00 BST on 23rd June 2008.
