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Hard disk corrupted
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razing32 Nov 21, 2017
Hi gang
Need some advice.
I came home today to a locked screen and a TTY line spitting out constant errors.
Was on Arch.

Installed Antergos to a free small SDD and trying to recover my 2 TB /home partition.
Gparted could not see /home mounted on /sdc or the / mounted on /sda though /sda for UEFI boot and swap showed up fine.

Currently running testdisk in deep search and will leave it running overnight. The quick search + write option did not help. Cannot mount the /dev/sdc1 partition.

If anyone went through something similar any advice is appreciated.
wolfyrion Nov 22, 2017
Recovery data is my expertise usually I charge a lot but I can help you for FREE , add me on steam :P
razing32 Nov 22, 2017
Quoting: wolfyrionRecovery data is my expertise usually I charge a lot but I can help you for FREE , add me on steam :P

Sure. I can do it when i get home.
(note i am on CET timezone)
IS your ID the same there ?

I can throw a few games/beers or even some cash your way :-P
wolfyrion Nov 22, 2017
Quoting: razing32
Quoting: wolfyrionRecovery data is my expertise usually I charge a lot but I can help you for FREE , add me on steam :P

Sure. I can do it when i get home.
(note i am on CET timezone)
IS your ID the same there ?

I can throw a few games/beers or even some cash your way :-P

yeap my steam id is on my profile, I am on EET – Eastern European Time (Standard Time) zone.
Usually I come at night home due to work.
ageres Nov 22, 2017
Did you try fsck?
damarrin Nov 22, 2017
Seeing as we have a professional here I'm loath to speak up at all, but recently when I had a disk problem R-Linux from r-tt.com did the job better than anything else I'd tried. It supports various variants of ext and is free. Just my 2c.
g000h Nov 22, 2017
Most recovery specialists would attempt to clone the broken drive as quickly as possible (so that it doesn't get worse) and then attempt to recover from the clone image. Also true of forensics analysis. If the drive doesn't have any errors, running testdisk while the partition is mounted read-only, might allow you to grab files.

Once you have backed up the data, you could attempt to fsck the partition.

I've done a fair amount of hard drive recovery myself over the years. Advise regular back-ups. Advise - don't keep using a broken drive (e.g. one on which SMART errors are growing.)
razing32 Nov 22, 2017
Quoting: ageresDid you try fsck?

Not yet

Quoting: damarrinSeeing as we have a professional here I'm loath to speak up at all, but recently when I had a disk problem R-Linux from r-tt.com did the job better than anything else I'd tried. It supports various variants of ext and is free. Just my 2c.

Cool. Will download and check it out

Quoting: g000hMost recovery specialists would attempt to clone the broken drive as quickly as possible (so that it doesn't get worse) and then attempt to recover from the clone image. Also true of forensics analysis. If the drive doesn't have any errors, running testdisk while the partition is mounted read-only, might allow you to grab files.

Once you have backed up the data, you could attempt to fsck the partition.

I've done a fair amount of hard drive recovery myself over the years. Advise regular back-ups. Advise - don't keep using a broken drive (e.g. one on which SMART errors are growing.)

Was told to do a dd as soon as possible on other forums.
Will attempt to do so , but the problem is the broken disk is 2 TB and in a hurry the only large drive available in store I found is 4 TB. Can dd work around this ? OR is there something better ?
g000h Nov 22, 2017
Using ddrescue to clone from smaller drive to larger drive:
https://www.linux.com/learn/intro-to-linux/2017/3/gnu-ddrescue-best-damaged-drive-rescue

Using ddrescue to clone from smaller drive to image on larger drive:
https://datarecovery.com/rd/how-to-clone-hard-disks-with-ddrescue/

(If you do the image, then obviously the larger drive should have a file system on it, and sufficiently empty space.)
damarrin Nov 22, 2017
There's no problem copying a smaller drive to a larger one. Just don't do any resizing of partitions, etc on the clone before you do the recovery. Leave it as is and treat it like a smaller drive.

Ddrescue is designed specifically to copy from a failing drive with bad sectors. If the drive itself is fine and it's just damaged logically, dd will do just as well.
crt0mega Nov 22, 2017
Y not "dd" or "ddrescue" into a disk/partition image?
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