This is part of the hard disk recovery documentation.

Appendix.

Here are all the tools that made an arguably irreplaceable contribution in the recovery:

• Knoppix CD
• ddrescue
• DiskProbe
• fsstat (part of Knoppix)
• ext2 Installable File System (use with caution, as it may crap on your ext2 partition)
• Mount Image Pro
• vdk
• nfi
• chkdsk (part of Windows XP)
• ntbackup (part of Windows XP)
• Advanced EFS Data Recovery

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Why are cell phone unlock keys and keygen algorithms still being sold?
I understand there is a great profit motive to guard the secret, since with this ruling, unlocking has become a legal profession (for at least the next three years), unlike warez cracking.
But come on, somebody must have an itch to set the information free, no?

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With the news of Sodamn Insane’s execution plastered in big letters over the front pages of the new year weekend dailies (a strange phenomenon in itself), I realized that most of the world’s ancient execution methods do indeed go straight for the head.
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This is part of the hard disk recovery documentation.

Part 6.

Today I can go no farther (so I stopped)

The last days of this project are spent on two tiring tasks that do not gain me very much, but must be done to carry this project to its logical conclusion. One of these is to decrypt a few very small, but important NTFS-encrypted files. The other is to wring the last readable bits out of the broken Seagate drive by splitting all the error regions to isolate the unreadable regions as much as possible. These can proceed in parallel.
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My laptop hard drive died a painful death last week. Thanks to a friend (PGD) who agreed to be my ghostwriter for the initial draft, the process of my shuffling through the ruins is documented. This documentation is long, so it will be split into parts. The parts are assigned to the correct dates when the things described happened. Therefore, the sort order of the parts and the sort order of the dates do not necessarily match.

Part 0.

The story begins:

A 40GB laptop hard drive using NTFS became corrupted. The laptop could not boot off its normal disk, so was booted by CD into a Linux environment to recover the data. The idea was to quickly save a raw image of the NTFS drive onto another disk, and to use recovery tools on the image… It turned out this was much easier said than done.

On to Part 1.

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This is part of the hard disk recovery documentation.

Part 5.

The tide turns (rather quickly)

After the exceedingly annoying but ultimately inconsequential ext2 interlude, I’m back on track with the original problem of recovering data from the broken Seagate drive.
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This is part of the hard disk recovery documentation.

Part 4.

I rammed my head against the wall (of absurdity that is ext2), and all was clear

The obvious need to fork off another hard disk recovery project from a hard disk recovery project was just too pathetic to think about so I kicked this aside for a day. Today I started back from the beginning, this time researching the ext2 filesystem. The documentation (that is within reach of Google) for this file system is just poor. Whoever is responsible for documenting this part of Linux should be flogged, or at least made to go home and do it over. Yeah, I can go look at the source code (which I did), but I’m sorry, that does not constitute proper documentation.

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This is part of the hard disk recovery documentation.

Part 3.

Today I became suspicious of (the ext2ifs driver, the mkfs command, the USB enclosure, and basically) everything

On Christmas morning Santa Claus had not granted my wish: ddrescue was still running, but the image file had not been timestamped any more recently than when I left it, and the damaged drive had spun down by itself. dmesg revealed a syslog message “too many IO errors” or something like that, which had caused Linux to give up on reading from the damaged drive. I was very frustrated because, well let’s see, I had expected the disk imaging to make good progress, but instead… I must suffer a reboot and the induced indefinite re-churning of the drive, with even more data loss! What.
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This is part of the hard disk recovery documentation.

Part 2.

I tried a whole bunch of things (most that didn’t work), and all that.

What is there to do? Data recovery services that run into the thousands of dollars can probably get most of the data back — they have a track record of that. My data isn’t worth nearly that much, sad to say. But I don’t feel like abandoning perfectly good data, either. Yes, there is probably McNorton ViralGhostSpy or whatever this bloatware is called these days; I don’t know… I prefer more flexibility so I’ll take the trouble to proceed with free or freely available tools.
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This is part of the hard disk recovery documentation.

Part 1.

Today I became suspicious of Seagate products (and my fortune in general)

Windows XP was running, and programs were being used. The disk was probably being accessed for memory cache. I noticed the drive making repetitive noises, spinning down and then spinning up, and the machine became unusable. I power-cycled the machine, and it was “NTOSKRNL.EXE is missing or corrupt.” Bad news.
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