Invisible wrote:
> 
> Moderately cute... but very bossy.
> 
> She's one of these people who has an attitude that she's important or 
> something, and everybody else had better recognise that.
> 
> I can do better. ;-)
> 

sometimes those scare me
it's like getting a date with the cutest girl in the class -then finding 
she has a squeaky voice and never shuts up


> That *is* of course the real question. But in true geek fashion, I'm 
> more intrigued by having an excuse to research the techniques involved 
> in data recovery than actually helping this person.
> 

You are right.

Way back in the day before hard drives I had the opportunity to repair 
an Apple IIe floppy disk where the file table 'catalog' got blown away.

Luckily I had a 'Disk Doctor' that would edit raw sectors so I could 
rebuild it.

The bad thing was that the 'Disk Doctor' was the one that got blown away.

I managed to fix the disk enough to run the main program so I could fix 
the rest of the disk.  Getting the first one back was murder - due to 
the lack of a good sector editor.

All in all I think I managed to recover everything but one or two files 
that I didn't care about.  Back then disks only held 360k so it wasn't 
all that much work.


Good Luck!



Tom

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Tom Austin wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>>
>> Moderately cute... but very bossy.
>>
>> She's one of these people who has an attitude that she's important or 
>> something, and everybody else had better recognise that.
>>
>> I can do better. ;-)
> 
> sometimes those scare me
> it's like getting a date with the cutest girl in the class -then finding 
> she has a squeaky voice and never shuts up

It's like the one where Brainiac was doing some dubiously scientific 
experiment or other that called for a beautiful women.

"THIS... is Gemma. Gemma... is LOVELY."

Hell yeah, she looks hot!

...and THEN she opened her mouth, and suddenly any interest I had in her 
completely evapourated. I didn't know a voice could do that... o_O

>> That *is* of course the real question. But in true geek fashion, I'm 
>> more intrigued by having an excuse to research the techniques involved 
>> in data recovery than actually helping this person.
> 
> You are right.
> 
> Way back in the day before hard drives I had the opportunity to repair 
> an Apple IIe floppy disk where the file table 'catalog' got blown away.
> 
> Luckily I had a 'Disk Doctor' that would edit raw sectors so I could 
> rebuild it.
> 
> The bad thing was that the 'Disk Doctor' was the one that got blown away.
> 
> I managed to fix the disk enough to run the main program so I could fix 
> the rest of the disk.  Getting the first one back was murder - due to 
> the lack of a good sector editor.
> 
> All in all I think I managed to recover everything but one or two files 
> that I didn't care about.  Back then disks only held 360k so it wasn't 
> all that much work.
> 
> 
> Good Luck!

Heh. Apparently she's going to get the IT department at the place her 
boyfriend works for to try to recover it first. Either she thinks I'm 
incompetent, or she's really in a hurry...

Like I said, I don't really care about her plight - she should have kept 
multiple copies - I'm more interested in the interlectual challenge of 
fixing a broken filesystem. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:50:23 +0100, Invisible wrote:

> Well, well... It appears one of our employees kept "everything" on a USB
> flash drive. And guess what? Yah, that's right. Now every time she tries
> to use that drive, it says the drive isn't formatted.
> 
> I have no idea why a working drive would suddenly do this,

I've read reports that flash storage devices have a limited number of 
write cycles before they become bricks.  I had set up one device with a 
journaling filesystem and had several people comment that this was a bad 
idea because of the limited-use nature of this type of device.

Easy test:  Plug it into another computer and see if you can read it.  If 
you can, it's her PC; if you can't, it's the drive.

Jim

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Invisible wrote:
> Dodgy, much?

No. Free samples. If the free version doesn't work, you just saved the 
cost of paying for something that won't work.

No more dodgey than giving away the first level of a game for free, I'd 
think.

> Copying the entire filesystem off the drive should be a simple matter 
> for dd. 

Assuming the hardware is physically OK, yeh.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> I've read reports that flash storage devices have a limited number of 
> write cycles before they become bricks.

  No need to read "reports". Just read the specs of the flash storage
device.

  However, modern flash storage devices (which work properly) can be
rewritten something like 100 thousand times before they will show any
signs of malfunction.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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I'd suggest using ddrescue to (hopefully) image the drive first, then possibly
photorec to try and recover files.  Sysresccd contains these tools and is awesome.

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On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:35:10 -0400, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> I've read reports that flash storage devices have a limited number of
>> write cycles before they become bricks.
> 
>   No need to read "reports". Just read the specs of the flash storage
> device.

<sigh>

I had asked questions about using a journaling filesystem and it was 
told.  Yes, I could've read the specs but I didn't.  So shoot me.

Oh, wait, you just did.

>   However, modern flash storage devices (which work properly) can be
> rewritten something like 100 thousand times before they will show any
> signs of malfunction.

The number I heard was 10,000.  With a JFS, that can happen fairly 
quickly.

Jim

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Jim Henderson wrote:
>> rewritten something like 100 thousand times before they will show any

> The number I heard was 10,000. 

It depends on the manufacturing. 10,000 used to be a good number a 
couple of years ago. (Originally it was closer to 1000.) Newer versions 
do more, with development driven by things like cell phones needing to 
store text messages and etc in flash.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:01:04 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>>> rewritten something like 100 thousand times before they will show any
> 
>> The number I heard was 10,000.
> 
> It depends on the manufacturing. 10,000 used to be a good number a
> couple of years ago. (Originally it was closer to 1000.) Newer versions
> do more, with development driven by things like cell phones needing to
> store text messages and etc in flash.

Makes sense. :)

Jim

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Invisible wrote:
> 
> She's one of these people who has an attitude that she's important or 
> something, and everybody else had better recognise that.
> 

The data on that stick is not recoverable.

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
    http://www.zbxt.net
       aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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