I had a shocking error of judgement this morning when I accidentally deleted some of my son’s photos from his toy digital camera. They were sitting on my desktop, and I was on a cleanup… These were a casualty of my cleanup-fest and obsession with the shift key. Thinking on a Windows vein – I [...]

Following up on a post about recovering bad disks and reiser file systems, here is a list of ddrescue commands to help make life that little bit easier: Backup MBR (boot code + partition table): <code>dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr count=1 bs=512</code> Restore boot code + partition table: <code>dd if=mbr of=/dev/hda</code> Restore, not including partition table: <code>dd [...]

So, maybe in part 1 the data recovery didn’t work for you? Well, that’s OK because Linux is robust against bad discs in one form or another. The trick is to work out what that might be. A good method is to use dd or dd_rescue. These tools create a forensic copy of your hard [...]

Today, I’ve been working on a server that doesn’t want to mount one of the partitions that has been formatted with reiserfs. Using the fsck command doesn’t work because there are bad blocks on the drive, resulting in fsck vehemently refusing to cooperate.: Cannot read the block (41713664): (Input/output error). To get fsck to play [...]

The battle is on. Me vs. the Windows disk structure.