Hard drive recovery explanations

[balinares]

Okay. As promised, here's a short* article on how I went about recovering my data off a dead hard drive. The topic is inherently mucho technical, but I'm trying to write it in such a way it remains a pleasant and interesting read for the less technically inclined among you guys. (One of my few recurring joys in this field: managing to explain shit

Comments

[balinares]

Oui c'était un peu ce que j'espérais, que ça puisse aussi être approchable par les non geeks pour qui ce genre de choses relève usuellement de la pure magie. ... En même temps je sais pas s'il y aura un seul non-geek qui aura lu plus loin qu'un paragraphe ou deux, mais bon, même.

[grey_wolf_xvii]

Je dois avouer avoir abandonner vers "Recovering the partitions".

[balinares]

En même temps si tu es pas trop informaticien c'est déjà assez balaise de ta part d'avoir suivi jusque là!

[msondo]

Very interesting. :) I don't have time to read all of it now but I will later. Thanks for sharing this!

[balinares]

You're welcome! And thanks. :)

[roaminrob]

Well done! (I came across this via Baxil).

I've yet to pull off a successful drive recovery that let me get as far as you did; the last time, the customer had a head crash at the innermost track of the drive platters. I practiced the black art of the platter transfer, carefully transferring the platters from the dead drive (damaged head) to a matching donor drive, but it turns out that some drives (most? all?) won't even attempt to access their data unless they can read whatever's in that innermost track. IIRC, the innermost track in this case contained the drive geometry info.

So, it's good to hear a successful drive rescue story!

[balinares]

... Platter transfer... >O.o< Okay, you win hands down. :)

[kefen]

That's mighty impressive! And I tell you, even if people are unlikely to run into exactly the same kind of problem, I'm pretty sure there are a lots of good ideas in your explanation that can be re-used :)

Thanks a lot!

[balinares]

That would be nice! This was my purpose when I wrote the whole article, anyway.

[giza]

You're far more patient at recovering data and messing with the MBR than I am.

I just yell at people to back their shit up next time. :-P

[balinares]

Well, that works! But as said before, backing the shit up was the initial plan, that only got foiled owing to shortage of backing-shit-up supplies. Bugger'n'stuff, as they say.