Rescuing files.

K

KenGordon

I am not sure that this is the correct place to discuss my latest issue, but here goes:

I have been trying, for the past several days, to rescue some files from a messed-up Windows install on a friend's laptop which has a 128 GB SSD installed in it. I won't go into the details of how he really made a mess of things, but suffice to say that he is a real computo-klutz. He IS well over 80 years old, but what he did was, well, spectacular.

In any case, I first completely disconnected my main FreeBSD desktop machine from the net after installing some helpful software, including ddrescue. After making sure my machine could not be accessed by or to the net, I ran ddrescue on the correct SSD found by using gpart show, and saving the image files to a 2TB HDD I had installed and configured previously with a BSD file system.

I then used mdconfig on the image files to make the necessary virtual memory disk devices for the several "slices" of the SSD. There ended up being the following devices: md0, md0p1, md0p2, md0p3 and md0p4.

Doing file -s /dev/md0p3 returns valuable information.....but, I absolutely cannot copy/paste it anywhere but into another terminal. I need to be able to post that info here so I can, perhaps, receive some needed advice, but at this point I am stuck.

According to info I found on the net, I SHOULD be able to mount any of the necessary md0* disk images and be able to operate on them, but so far, I have absolutely been unable to do so, the error returning says that the file type is incorrect. no matter which file type I try to use.

So, first, can anyone advise me how to copy/paste from the terminal into a page like this one? NONE of the standard methods I have tried will paste any selection I make in a terminal into any other place which is NOT another terminal window. I have even tried xclip with, so far, no success.

I have also installed TestDisk 7.2 in order to check the SSD directly, but have not yet run it to completion. It appears to be able to find the missing files, but I am still fighting the copy/paste issue.

Thanks.

Ken Gordon
 
How about pasting the information into a text file via a terminal editor, then open that text file in a new browser tab (file://absolute-path-to-file, ie. file:///home/me/status.txt)
Maybe then you can copy/paste between browser tabs?
 
Gee. Thanks LeeBrown66. That can be made to work.

So....here is the output from the command, file -s /dev/md0p3 <ENTER>

root@KensOffice:/mnt/6TB # /dev/md0p3: DOS/MBR boot sector, code offset 0x58+2, OEM-ID "-FVE-FS-", sectors/cluster 8, reserved sectors 0, Media descriptor 0xf8, sectors/track 63, heads 255, hidden sectors 239616, FAT (32 bit), sectors/FAT 8160, serial number 0, unlabeled; NTFS, sectors/track 63, physical drive 0x1fe0, $MFT start cluster 393217, serial number 02020454d414e204f, checksum 0x41462020

Then, the command mount -a -t ntfs /dev/md0p3 /mnt/Joes3 (or any other file type, i.e. msdosfs, etc.), answers

mount: /dev/md0p3: Invalid fstype: Invalid argument

Again, no matter what filetype I attempt to use. So, what am I doing wrong here?

I believe there is a command, gnop, or something like that which can ignore a certain number of bits before, say, the NTFS part, but I have not yet found details on how to use that, nor if it will even do what I need it to.

Ken Gordon
 
OK. So, I input:

mount -a -t filesystems/ntfs /dev/md0p3 /mnt/Joes3

Output is:

mount: /dev/md0p3: File name too long

Now, I have installed and use regularly, fuse ntfs-3g and, in fact, fuse ntfs-3g is in the kernel, as I use commands in fstab to automatically load at least two ntfs drives for access to the files which are there, and I would think that that might be a necessary part of the solution to my problem, but I have not yet figured out how to implement that in this case.

Ken Gordon
 
If the disk partitions allways was ntfs use some windows 7/10 live usb , use the right tool for the job....
There are plenty of tools
 
Disclaimer: I know nothing about this, but a quick search suggests using this to get debug info. That output is less than helpful.
ntfs-3g -o debug /dev/ada2s1 /mnt/drive_d
 
so, when I attempt to mount md0p3 using ntfs-3g, here is what I get:

:/mnt/6TB # ntfs-3g /dev/md0p3 /mnt/Joes3
NTFS signature is missing.
Failed to mount '/dev/md0p3': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/md0p3' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.
Maybe the wrong device is used? Or the whole disk instead of a
partition (e.g. /dev/sda, not /dev/sda1)? Or the other way around?
 
Are we sure that 3rd partition is the right one? Can you post output of the command gpart show -p md0 to see which partitions are there.

There is also a command called fstyp to determine info about the file system on the specified partition. Similar to what file -s does.
 
Well, I have tools I can use in Windows, but I REALLY wanted to use FreeBSD because I thought it would be safer.

OK. Later,

Ken Gordon
 
Have you tried using mount -f to force mount a filesystem that was not cleanly unmounted?

If you're trying to recover files, you might want to use mount -r for read-only.

For future reference, did you use -selection CLIPBOARD with xclip? Unhelpfully, the default selection is the primary selection buffer not the clipboard.
 
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