Don't Tread On Me Director's Hotel Room Burglarized, Script Stolen

Restore the Republic ^ | 1-23-10 | Debbie Morgan

[Fichori]

“So, you can use a Linux disk to recover data on a Windows machine?”

Uh, yeah, thats usually the case.

Not all Linux live CD's will be set up to do it, but Linux inherently has the core functionality. (ie, it can read lots of different file systems)

[wally_bert]

Boot to a live CD and mount the drive of the PC, it works very well.

[dsc]

Thanks.

[dsc]

“it can read lots of different file systems”

Even if there is data corruption?

Norton unerase used to search bit by bit on the hard drive, ignoring the stuff on the drive that tells Windows where a file is.

If the boot sector or file index entries are corrupt, can you still get data back using Linux?

[dsc]

Steponallofus is a sodomite?

[Fichori]

“Even if there is data corruption?

Norton unerase used to search bit by bit on the hard drive, ignoring the stuff on the drive that tells Windows where a file is.

If the boot sector or file index entries are corrupt, can you still get data back using Linux?”

If you can read the disk (ie, its not damaged) then you can recover the data.

If the filesystem or some of the files have been corrupted, then whatever information is actually corrupted is unrecoverable.

In Linux, each hard disk is represented by a file that contains all the data that resides on the disk, including the partition table and filesystem[s].

I do not believe Linux requires a drive to have a valid boot sector to access a filesystem thereon. (not too sure about that one)

A drive with a corrupted filesystem probably will only be accessible at the block level. (ie, reading the disk's image file itself)

I am unaware if there is a standard Linux program like Norton Unerase that recovers files from a disk image, but I did write one for recovering text files from damaged floppy disks.


To give you an idea how Linux handles hard drives, if you have two disks in a Linux computer you can copy an image of one onto the other (granted there is room), and then access its filesystem.

You can also create a regular file (like on the Desktop) and format it like a hard disk and then store files on it.

So, you could, say, copy a Windows disk image onto a drive running Linux, and then access the files normally from within Linux as if the Windows disk image was a real hard drive. (if you had Wine installed in the Linux computer, you could then run many of the Windows programs from within Linux)

CD and DVD ISO's can be read similarly.


Now, in situations where the disk is actually damaged, sometimes its possible to do a brute force read and get all the data except what is actually damaged.


So yeah, extracting text files from a disk image is easy. (as long as they are plain ascii text and not utf8 or utf16)

For pictures, pdf, zip, and other types of documents, not so simple. (not to say impossible, though)

It all depends on how much the files are worth.

The simplest of course, is to see if Linux can read the disk. (not all errors are show stoppers)

FWIW. (hopefully I got all that right...)

[dsc]

Thanks a lot for the time and trouble. Very informative.

Most of that was completely new to me. I haven’t felt up to taking on Linux.

[Fichori]

You are very welcome!

Trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of Linux can be a bit daunting, but fortunately it now has a huge user community which is often very helpful.

I’ve been using it for ~10 years now and I’m still learning new things about it. (the Ubuntu forums have a wealth of info)

If you ever decide you might want to see what its like, get a Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) Live CD. (the two most user friendly OS’s I’ve used)