Recovering Data from Hard drive

knightjp

knightjp

I have a FreeBSD system with a secondary HDD for my data. Its formatted in UFS and recently I noticed that it would not mount and when I run 'fsck' it would give some error and ask me to rerun it again.
Its and old drive, so I'm guessing it's had it and I think I will replace it. I would like to know be able to recover the data from the drive.
So far when it does mount, it shows to be blank. I'm sure that's not the case since I did not format at all.
 
You might want to check for bad spots with smartctl(8). And it sounds like the primary directory structure might have been corrupted.

knightjp said:
So far when it does mount, it shows to be blank.
Click to expand...
That's not good. What kind of data was on the disk? Pictures, documents? There are some 'rescue' tools that can scan the disk looking for specific file types, and can sometimes restore a whole bunch of 'lost' files. No guarantees but it might be better than losing everything.

In any case, make an image backup of the entire disk (sysutils/ddrescue might be needed if there's a lot of bad sectors). Disconnect this bad drive so it can't get any worse. Work on the image to see if you can recover anything from it.
 
SirDice said:
You might want to check for bad spots with smartctl(8). And it sounds like the primary directory structure might have been corrupted.


That's not good. What kind of data was on the disk? Pictures, documents? There are some 'rescue' tools that can scan the disk looking for specific file types, and can sometimes restore a whole bunch of 'lost' files. No guarantees but it might be better than losing everything.

In any case, make an image backup of the entire disk (sysutils/ddrescue might be needed if there's a lot of bad sectors). Disconnect this bad drive so it can't get any worse. Work on the image to see if you can recover anything from it.
Click to expand...
The data is mostly pictures and some documents. You're probably correct. A bad sector is preventing it from being mounted correctly, etc.
Thank you for the info.. I will try that and revert later.
 
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