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Published On: Dec 09, 2003 10:42 AM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Dec 09, 2003 10:42 AM
When is it Time to Surrender?
I have now spent so much time (and some money I didn't
have) on trying to recover data from that damned hard disk. It has been the most
exasperating process!
I have now spent so much time (and some money I didn't
have) on trying to recover data from that damned hard disk. It has been the most
exasperating process! (For those just tuning in, a bug in the new Apple
Operating System caused a lot of peoples' external Firewire hard drives to lose
a lot of data at the first several block of their disks, where much of the
directory is stored. I had borrowed my roommate's Firewire drive to backup some
data on both of my Apple computers while I rebuilt them with the new operating
system, and before I had a chance to put the files back on the computers, the
bug hit and I lost everything.
I downloaded the only utility people had reported success using—Drive Rescue X—and ran it to see if it could recover anything. The demo version I downloaded would scan the drive and recover one single file and then you had to pay $80 to upgrade it to the full version if you wanted to do any more. The program wasn't able to see a single file, so I figured I was out of luck.
There was one last thing to try before giving up. I'd read somewhere that someone had been successful at doing a "quick initialize" of their hard disk. That process had somehow created enough of a partition mapping (or something like that) that Data Rescue X was then able to find files. Since I had all but surrendered, I gave this a shot. Lo a behold Data Rescue X showed thousands of files. It showed the directories and files of everything I had backed up. So it was able to show that the files were there, although recovering their contents was a different matter.
Writing a full technical account here would take up a lot more space and few people would benefit, so I'll summarize. I blew the $80 upgrading to the full version of the recovery software, but it has proven completely unable to figure out the Allocation Map parameters of the drive and partition, so any time I "recover" a file I just get garbage. I can theoretically determine these parameters by finding two known files on the hard drive and reverse-calculating their directory positions, but "needle in haystack" doesn't even come close to describing looking for specific data on a 200 gigabyte drive. I can look at raw data blocks and scroll through them as fast as possible and probably spend 100 years looking for data. (There are about 380 million 512-byte blocks and I can look at them one at a time. See the impossibility?) I've tried a simple utility to search the hard drive for known strings, but it takes several hours per string, and I've still had no luck.
The frustrating thing is that I've already wasted so much damned time on this venture, and I don't know how much more I should invest before giving up. The fact of the matter is I have MOST of my important data backed up properly. My Quicken data for the past year is gone, as are a few work files I would like to have preserved, plus the September archive of this blog, but otherwise it's just looking like it isn't worth it.
I downloaded the only utility people had reported success using—Drive Rescue X—and ran it to see if it could recover anything. The demo version I downloaded would scan the drive and recover one single file and then you had to pay $80 to upgrade it to the full version if you wanted to do any more. The program wasn't able to see a single file, so I figured I was out of luck.
There was one last thing to try before giving up. I'd read somewhere that someone had been successful at doing a "quick initialize" of their hard disk. That process had somehow created enough of a partition mapping (or something like that) that Data Rescue X was then able to find files. Since I had all but surrendered, I gave this a shot. Lo a behold Data Rescue X showed thousands of files. It showed the directories and files of everything I had backed up. So it was able to show that the files were there, although recovering their contents was a different matter.
Writing a full technical account here would take up a lot more space and few people would benefit, so I'll summarize. I blew the $80 upgrading to the full version of the recovery software, but it has proven completely unable to figure out the Allocation Map parameters of the drive and partition, so any time I "recover" a file I just get garbage. I can theoretically determine these parameters by finding two known files on the hard drive and reverse-calculating their directory positions, but "needle in haystack" doesn't even come close to describing looking for specific data on a 200 gigabyte drive. I can look at raw data blocks and scroll through them as fast as possible and probably spend 100 years looking for data. (There are about 380 million 512-byte blocks and I can look at them one at a time. See the impossibility?) I've tried a simple utility to search the hard drive for known strings, but it takes several hours per string, and I've still had no luck.
The frustrating thing is that I've already wasted so much damned time on this venture, and I don't know how much more I should invest before giving up. The fact of the matter is I have MOST of my important data backed up properly. My Quicken data for the past year is gone, as are a few work files I would like to have preserved, plus the September archive of this blog, but otherwise it's just looking like it isn't worth it.
Posted: Mon - November 17, 2003 at 11:10 AM