Half past twelve and I’m watching the late show in my flat all alone, how I hate to spend

[hazelchaz]

Photos from the Hugo Awards on Sunday night (07-Aug-2005) are online, including the post-Hugo party. Click on the picture of frostfox and flickgc conspiring during the Hugo Nominees Reception to see the photos. Also Monday, the last day of the convention, and Tuesday, when we headed up to Inverness, are up.

Website Recovery Fund stands at $622 in donations. Thanks to Eric, Selina, and Vanessa for the contributions and support.

I've been uncovering photos that were temporarily stored on one computer or another, so I've been prepping them to go online. And the dead Linux disk drive has arrived in my office in Santa Ana. Tools that have been suggested (please post a follow-up comment if your suggestion's missing):

• SpinRite
  
• Easy Recovery Pro
  
• Ontrack something or other (they have a tool on ontrack.com)
  

Comments

[drakkenfyre.livejournal.com]

I'm worried about whether the problem is in the drive controller on the drive (the I part of IDE is what I'm trying to describe here), or really is a problem on the last mobo it was connected to. Do you have any other info on exactly what happened?

Also, what file system was that drive using? I'll post the whole big question to my Unix users' group after I know.

Also, a request: Would you make some sort of icon or banner or button that says "I donated to Hazel's website recovery fund"?
Yeah, I'm an ego-craved girl. Oh, and I'm going to donate tomorrow or the next day, just want to deposit my cheque first.

Linux drive...

[hazelchaz]

The drive was connected to dd_b's motherboard's disk controller. It went crazy one night, and started randomly deleting or overwriting directories and files.

it's a LInux drive, single partition. More than that I'll have to pump dd_b for... what questions should I be asking?\

It's a 60 GB drive. (My photos are about 7 GB of it.)

dd_b unplugged it from the bad motherboard disk controller, and powered it up (read-only) with a different disk controller. It didn't go haywire -- but the damage had already been done (that is, things has already been deleted/overwritten). He made a byte-wise copy of the drive, ran FSCK on that, and got back some stuff -- but not much, and not my many thousand photos. (Which were in the HTML tree, of course, under .../hazel/hazel/Pix/.)

Apart from powering it up in read-only mode, the drive hasn't been plugged into a computer since the failure.

An icon or banner? Sure, I'll look into it when I get back from my weekend in Seattle.

Chaz

Drive recovery update

[dspisak.livejournal.com]

I have recovered all possible photos from the damaged disk. Some caveates however:

1. This includes photos that had been deleted in a previous life.

2. This means I have recovered every single file that was a photo or pretended to be a photo as far as my recovery software is concerned.

3. Just because it was about to recover the file doesn't necessarily mean the integrity of the photo is intact. The program can't undo certain kinds of damage or file corruption (i.e. if random data was written into the middle of a JPEG if will recover the whole JPEG file, but the middle of the picture will likely have some corruption of visible data)

4. If my software could, it would attach the original filename to the picture if possible. Otherwise it would label files "Unallocated Cluster XXXX.[png][jpg][etc]".

5. A significant majority of the files recovered fall in the "unallocated cluster 1.jpg" variety.

6. I have approximately 21GB or 4-5 DVDs worth of recovered files of these types:
JPG
PNG
GIF
BMP
ZIP

I could possibly recover more if I use the Stellar Pheonix tool. I ran it and it took it about 2 days to find all the files on the drive that it could. If I use it its possible to recover some additional file types like HTML, MPEG, SIT, DOC, etc. However, I am unable to determine what the quality of those recovered files would be. If I told Phoenix to recover every file type that it could that I thought was useful to you and the other users of this drive it results in about 25GB of data or 6-7 DVDs.

Let me know what you'd like to do next.

Re: Drive recovery update

[hazelchaz]

Wow! Thanks! That's an amazing start.

You say "I have approximate 21GB or 4-5 DVDs..." does that mean that you have the files and you are in a position to burn DVDs of them? If so, then I expect the next step is to burn two sets of DVDs, so we can start restoring them to the website.

Can you just tell Phoenix to recover every file it can? We're probably not talking about more than 8 or 10 DVDs that way, are we?

I'm looking for *.dbm, *.htm, *.cgi, and Maildir files -- they'd have filenames like 1127291304.V2201I620084.gw.dd-b.net or 1103330307.18702.gw.dd-b.net:2,S so it doesn't map easily to a file extension. Plus, the other users of the website will be interested. (That's why I'm asking for two sets of DVDs -- one would get sent to Mpls. and one would stay here.)

Thank you so much for your help!

(Reply to this)

Re: Drive recovery update

[dspisak.livejournal.com]

Yes, I can burn that set of data to DVDs.

I can only tell Phoenix to recovery filetypes that it already understands signatures for. Odds are it can revocer many of those filetypes you speak of but I'm not sure if it can do all of them. Additionally, we would need to spend money to activate Phoenix to allow it to save the recovered files. Without activation all Phoenix can do is see what files are recoverable but I cant see what the contents of the recoverable files until its activated and I tell it to recover the files.

Re: Drive recovery update

[hazelchaz]

I'm certainly willing to spend money to recover as much as we can.

Re: Drive recovery update

[dspisak.livejournal.com]

I need you to purchase an activation code for Phoenix today and email it to me at dspisak@nonmundane.org. The sooner the better, esp if you can get it to me today. Thanks!

Re: Drive recovery update

[dspisak.livejournal.com]

Ok I recovered what I could with Phoenix, sadly its file recovery capabilities werent so hot. None of the files are named what the once used to be instead they are all something like "23423562.HTM" etc with XXXXXXX being the sector on the hard disk that the file was on. I'm going to go ahead and burn two sets of DVDs for the backed up data. I am not sure if we got any of the CGI files too much data to comb through right now, but it might be included in some of the HTM or HTML files. The Phoenix tool wasnt able to get any DBM files from what I saw. Overall I think we have a fair amount of recivered data, just the problem is that most of it is unlabeled namewise. I don't know if you still want to send the drive off to a professional data recovery service or not, they may yeild better results then I potentially. If you end up not sending the disk to them I'd ask for a donoation for my time and services if thats possible. Email me the address I will be shipping DVDs to and I will let you know when I get those out the door (probably Mondayish)

Re: Drive recovery update

[dspisak.livejournal.com]

I need you to purchase an activation license and email it to me. The sooner the better. In fact if you can get it to me today that would be best. Send the activation email to me at dspisak@nonmundane.org

Re: Drive recovery update

[hazelchaz]

Tell me the url to go to in order to buy it, please...