Important lessons for computers owners:
- Set up a backup system
- Use that backup system regularly
It turns out that while I set up a backup system for my wife’s computer, the last time it was ran was sometime late 2009… So when the primary Windows partition on that computer no longer booted; was not recognised as a Windows install by the Windows install CD rescue option; and would not mount using the ntfs-3g driver from Linux, I knew I was in trouble! Luckily, I had split the Windows install to have a separate partition where most of her data (photos, music, documents) were sitting and that partition was still mountable. So, in the worst case scenario, the total damage would be limited to Firefox and Thunderbird profiles and whatever was saved on the desktop.
Recovering more data from the hard-drive was not particularly difficult as the hard-drive still basically worked. In that case, the first step in any data recovery attempt is to create a disk image of the broken partition. This prevents any further damage to the hard-drive making you life worse. A good tool for the job is GNU ddrescure (which may be named ddrescue or gddrescue depending on your Linux distribution). Make sure you have the GNU version as the other software with the same name is less user friendly. It can take a long time to take an image of a hard-drive so having some nice output and being able to stop and restart at any stage are quite essential. Creating an image is as simple as running (as root):
ddrescue -r3 /dev/sda2 imagefile logfile
The log file shows that the hard-drive had quite a few corrupt parts, all relatively small and close together so my guess is some sort of physical damage preventing those being read.
# Rescue Logfile. Created by GNU ddrescue version 1.13
# Command line: ddrescue -r3 /dev/sda2 imagefile logfile
# current_pos current_status
0x30D31E00 +
# pos size status
0x00000000 0x309EB000 +
0x309EB000 0x00001000 -
0x309EC000 0x00073000 +
0x30A5F000 0x00002000 -
0x30A61000 0x00073000 +
0x30AD4000 0x00002000 -
0x30AD6000 0x00073000 +
0x30B49000 0x00002000 -
0x30B4B000 0x000FC000 +
0x30C47000 0x00001000 -
0x30C48000 0x00074000 +
0x30CBC000 0x00001000 -
0x30CBD000 0x00074000 +
0x30D31000 0x00001000 -
0x30D32000 0x7F5409E00 +
So now you have an image of your hard-drive, it is time to get those files out. Given the disk image was relatively complete, I went for software called Sleuth Kit. It has a frontend called Autopsy, which I found fairly useless apart from browsing the data. To use it, start Autopsy by pointing it at directory where all its files are to be stored and then point your web browser at the relevant place:
mkdir autopsydir
autopsy -d autopsydir
firefox http://localhost:9999/autopsy
While browsing the data was good to confirm that most of the files I wanted were still there, I just wanted to extract every single file possible from the image and I would then copy all the relevant stuff over to the new computer as necessary. Slueth Kit has some command-line tools for doing that; fls for listing files and icat for getting them. Using these, you can extract the files one at a time… but a simple script will automate extracting everything.
#!/bin/sh
IMAGE=../imagefile
fls -urp $IMAGE |
while read type inode name; do
echo $name
case $type in
d/d) mkdir -p "$name" ;;
r/r) [ ! -f "$name" ] && icat $IMAGE $(echo $inode | sed 's/://g') > "$name" ;;
esac
done
That will take a long time to run, especially if it is your primary Windows install drive as it will have lots of small files to extract. So I made that script so that it can continue where it left off. Just do not stop one run in the middle of an important file or it will not finish extracting it. You might want to also touch hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys in the extraction directory first as they are relatively useless and will take up a few gigabytes each.
So everything appears to have been recovered and I survived the lack of backup! Windows 7 has a good feature that reminds you to set up a backup and run it regularly, so hopefully I will not need to do this again.