Data recovery tools.

Forum thread started by Earl Colby Pottinger on Sat, 2010-10-30 03:40

I 'dd' an image to the wrong drive and lost access to all the on a 149GB drive.

When I tried BFS-Tools it failed. I am asking if anyone else knows of any other recovery tools for Haiku. Or does this mean I need to write my own files scanning software?

Comments

Re: Data recovery tools.

by tonestone57 - 2010-10-30 14:41

Was the drive also bfs? If it was fat32 or ntfs previously you could try windows or linux program to recover. Or linux program for linux partition.

This question is better asked on the general mailing list.

Axel wrote a recovery tool but not sure where to get it. I do not see it in Haiku. Look through this interview for details:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/06/the-beos-filesystem.ars/3

Re: Data recovery tools.

by kvdman - 2010-10-30 17:09

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

claims bfs support.

it's on this livecd:

http://partedmagic.com/download.html

Re: Data recovery tools.

by AndrewZ - 2010-11-01 13:52

I might be wrong but I think the BFS tools by Axel were for BeOS BFS, not Haiku BFS. Better to verify before using :-)

Re: Data recovery tools.

by Earl Colby Pottinger - 2010-11-03 18:46

To AndrewZ;

I tested BFS-Tools. It does work with Haiku's BFS in my tests. But it does not like it if the Super-Block is destroyed!

The code I am writing will recover files even if the Super-Block is missing, but makes assumptions about the drive layout and will require the user's help to decide what possible configurations to use when it tries to recover files.

Since I don't write to the original drive, even if the user makes a mistake the files will not be damaged further, and the user can try again.

Expect an update to my code soon.

Re: Data recovery tools.

by Earl Colby Pottinger - 2010-11-03 18:53

To kvdman;

TestDisk look scary to me. Unless I read the instructions wrong it will write to the drive I want to recover. Mistakes will only cause more problems. Also I could find no info on using it with BFS in download read-me or info.

I will pass on TestDisk until I can find a larger drive to store an image copy of the original drive I damaged.

Besides, I am learning all sorts of stuff about Haiku's BFS by trying to write my own recovery program.

Re: Data recovery tools.

by Earl Colby Pottinger - 2010-11-03 19:00

Thanks for the URL. This is one of the references I lost when I damaged my drive. It will be very helpful for the differences between BeOS's and Haiku's file-systems.