[kwlug-disc] Media errors on a USB disk

[Charles McColm]

On Thu, 2010-10-21 at 16:15 -0400, Chris Frey wrote:
> Not sure how much actual technical detail they would be willing to share,
> but it sounds good.  If there is information they could share that would

So we've done a little of this in Computer Recycling, but not with
faulty drives, but overwritten, repartitioned and reformatted. The tool
we found that works best for recovering documents, videos, images is an
open source tool called foremost.

Sometimes when we want to emphasize how easy it is for someone to
recover data off a Windows system we'll tell clients about Recuva, a
free, but not open, program by Piriform (the same guys who put out
Ccleaner). It's basically a click through "find all these type of
documents" program that almost anyone can use (but it's Windows).

Foremost is great because it works on ext3 (I haven't tried on ext4 and
haven't used it in awhile) and does NTFS too. So awhile back I went to
recover some data off one of our clients' Linux boxes and it recovered a
bunch of Windows images as well.

The one thing I learned was to make an image and work from the image.
The problem with working with the original is that any access (even
trying to recover to another drive) tends to disturb data. So each time
you try to recover from the original you actually degrade the data on
the original drive.

Cheers,

Charles