Mounting image with a wasted partition table?

[Mike Garrett-2]

Greetings all,

I've recently had a hard disk crash with some data that I'm trying desperately to retrieve.  Photorec has pulled some of the photos that I need from it, but not many (though it did pull about 19000 useless jpgs from temp files on the windows partition. Lol).  Photorec pauses about half-way through the disk and then never finds any more pictures.  No OS will assign a drive letter or see the partitions, and testdisk doesn't see a partition table, it has to do a "quick search" of the cylinders on the drive to find the partition table, which it does successfully.

I tried (foolishly, I know) to write the partition table to the drive, and it said it wrote it, but it didn't change any of my symptoms.

That said, what I'd like to do is us ddrescue to create an image of the problem drive.  If the partition table, etc., is corrupt, I'm not sure if I'll be able to mount the image in linux to do much with the image, will I?  Even if this info is missing, can I still mount the image well enough to Testdisk it, fix the partition table, then try to see the third partition with a (hopefully) intact file system?

Thanks for your time!

Mike G.




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[Tom-331]

photorec unfortunately only recovers contiguous files, but if you image the disk to a good drive and then rebuild the partition table you might be lucky.

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 10:00 PM, Mike Garrett <garrett.mike@...> wrote:

Greetings all,

I've recently had a hard disk crash with some data that I'm trying desperately to retrieve.  Photorec has pulled some of the photos that I need from it, but not many (though it did pull about 19000 useless jpgs from temp files on the windows partition. Lol).  Photorec pauses about half-way through the disk and then never finds any more pictures.  No OS will assign a drive letter or see the partitions, and testdisk doesn't see a partition table, it has to do a "quick search" of the cylinders on the drive to find the partition table, which it does successfully.

I tried (foolishly, I know) to write the partition table to the drive, and it said it wrote it, but it didn't change any of my symptoms.

That said, what I'd like to do is us ddrescue to create an image of the problem drive.  If the partition table, etc., is corrupt, I'm not sure if I'll be able to mount the image in linux to do much with the image, will I?  Even if this info is missing, can I still mount the image well enough to Testdisk it, fix the partition table, then try to see the third partition with a (hopefully) intact file system?

Thanks for your time!

Mike G.




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[andrew zajac-2]

You don't want to mount the image of the entire drive and then use testdisk on it.  But in Linux, you don't really need Testdisk to mount a partition on a disk with a corrupt partition table, just set an offset when you mount the (lost) partition.  See here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery#Extract%20filesystem%20from%20recovered%20image


Basically, use mmls to show what partitions *seem* to be there and then mount (or try to mount) the filesystem there by specifying an offset.  All these tools (mmls is found in The Sleuth Kit, testdisk, photorec, gddrescue) are available in Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix)

http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org

Good Luck!

Andrew


--- On Thu, 7/16/09, Mike Garrett <garrett.mike@...> wrote:

From: Mike Garrett <garrett.mike@...>
Subject: [Bug-ddrescue] Mounting image with a wasted partition table?
To: bug-ddrescue@...
Received: Thursday, July 16, 2009, 8:00 AM

Greetings all,

I've recently had a hard disk crash with some data that I'm trying desperately to retrieve.  Photorec has pulled some of the photos that I need from it, but not many (though it did pull about 19000 useless jpgs from temp files on the windows partition. Lol).  Photorec pauses about half-way through the disk and then never finds any more pictures.  No OS will assign a drive letter or see the partitions, and testdisk doesn't see a partition table, it has to do a "quick search" of the cylinders on the drive to find the partition table, which it does successfully.

I tried (foolishly, I know) to write the partition table to the drive, and it said it wrote it, but it didn't change any of my symptoms.

That said, what I'd like to do is us ddrescue to create an image of the problem drive.  If the partition table, etc., is corrupt, I'm not sure if I'll be able to mount the image in linux to do much with the image, will I?  Even if this info is missing, can I still mount the image well enough to Testdisk it, fix the partition table, then try to see the third partition with a (hopefully) intact file system?

Thanks for your time!

Mike G.




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