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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, but it sounds
quite serious. Anyway, now I have a person begging me to get their data
back for them.
So what do we think, people? Is there a hope in hell of getting this
stuff back? How would you go about it?
A quick search with Google reveals an Aladdin's cave of flashy programs
that promise to get your data back. If you pay money, anyway. Even the
ones with "FREE!" splashed all over them are actually just demo versions
that show you the files it could get back if you just pay up with real
money first. Or maybe you can only recover the first 100 files. Or only
files under 10 KB in size. Or some other arbitrary limitation to force
you to buy the full deal.
Dodgy, much?
Anyway, there are a couple of possibilities here:
- The drive is fine, and the PC is broken.
- The drive is OK, but there's a software glitch preventing Windoze from
reading it.
- The drive is physically OK, but some filesystem data got mangled.
- The drive is actually broken, but most of the data is still readable.
- The drive is toast, and it's no longer possible to read anything at all.
If it's one of the first two, my job is pretty trivial. If it's the last
one, we're going to have to pay somebody to take the drive apart and
examine it. If it's either of the middle two possibilities, I basically
need to copy everything off the drive and examine it somehow.
Copying the entire filesystem off the drive should be a simple matter
for dd. After that, does anybody have any ideas for how to reconstruct
the filesystem? (I'm presuming it's going to be FAT16... USB flash
drives usualy are, aren't they?)
There are dozens of flashy programs that claim to reconstruct
filesystems, but they all cost money. (After all, people who are too
stupid to back up there data and need it back in an emergency will pay
the Earth, right?) Surely reconstructing the broken parts of a
filesystem isn't actually *that* hard? I mean, there are absolutely
millions of data recovery programs out there, so it can't be difficult.
Has nobody written some geeky Linux utility that will do this for free?
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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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.
>
>
> Dodgy, much?
>
> Anyway, there are a couple of possibilities here:
> - The drive is fine, and the PC is broken.
> - The drive is OK, but there's a software glitch preventing Windoze from
> reading it.
> - The drive is physically OK, but some filesystem data got mangled.
> - The drive is actually broken, but most of the data is still readable.
> - The drive is toast, and it's no longer possible to read anything at all.
>
> If it's one of the first two, my job is pretty trivial. If it's the last
> one, we're going to have to pay somebody to take the drive apart and
> examine it. If it's either of the middle two possibilities, I basically
> need to copy everything off the drive and examine it somehow.
>
The real question is:
How cute is she?
;-o
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Tom Austin wrote:
> The real question is:
>
> How cute is she?
>
> ;-o
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. ;-)
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.
Obligatory XKCD references:
http://xkcd.com/309/
http://xkcd.com/356/
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> So what do we think, people?
I think you should give her a lesson on keeping important data in more
than once place, as well as the importance of regular backupping.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> I think you should give her a lesson on keeping important data in more
> than once place, as well as the importance of regular backupping.
LOL! Now there's something I won't disagree with. ;-)
You would have *thought* this was already "obvious" to any intelligent
person - but apparently not...
The only real question is "what do you backup onto?" Personally I can
think of any number of valid answers - a second USB stick, for example.
(You'll note that my own USB stick is not backed up anywhere. You will
also note that it contains nothing I wouldn't mind losing.)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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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...
It's no longer a working drive, I'd wager.
Regards,
John
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>> I have no idea why a working drive would suddenly do this...
>
> It's no longer a working drive, I'd wager.
Well, that would indeed be amusing. We shall see. ;-)
Even so, you would think there would have to be some kind of *cause* for
this. The broken drive has been tried on another machine and found to
not work there either. However, the person made a comment about a second
USB drive having recently failed in exactly the same way. This makes me
rather suspicious...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Invisible wrote:
> Has nobody written some geeky Linux utility that will do this for free?
Well, let me see now...
It appears that Knoppix already contains a program called Test Disk that
is supposed to reconstruct broken partition tables, and of course there
is fsck.vfat which is meant to fix broken FAT filesystems.
So it looks like all I need to do (assuming the USB device is readable
at all) is use dd to dump the contents into a file, and then wave these
two tools over that file in an attempt to get something usable.
Shouldn't be too hard...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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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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