Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am trying to recover my Laptop’s Windows drive. Let’s get started!
This project… this project I never wanted to need… has bullied around other stuff, and I’ll be glad when the equipment I’m using for it is freed up.
What felt like ages ago, I was formatting a drive so I could install MineOS on a 1 TB drive and move my family’s Minecraft server over from a smaller drive. The tutorial I was following said to format sdb, and I formatted sdb, but sdc was the one I really wanted to format. I missed the warning signs, and by the time I noticed, the deed was done. Normal procedure would dictate that I immediately shut down and remove the affected drive, but it’s screwed in and the computer is presently functioning as my primary workstation. Aside from mounting it once or twice right away to verify the damage, I’ve mostly left it alone.
Ideally, I would have backed anything up right away and only worked on a copy. For that, we ordered an eSATA to SATA cable (with power included) and it came on a slow boat from Taiwan. In the meantime, doflagie, a friend from my family’s server who has a few decades in IT, told me how handy USB to SATA cords are and “[wished] you were next door, I’d throw you one!”
With the cord in hand, I hooked it up and quickly learned to treat it more like an internal SATA connection and less like an external USB drive. I HAVE A QUESTION OUT ABOUT USB TO eSATA. I had to rearrange the BIOS again to prefer USB over eSATA, but that wasn’t anything new to me.
I learned my way around the dd command. There’s a reason it’s called Disk Destroyer, and I’m thankful I haven’t learned that lesson for myself yet, and I hope this lesson I’m going through now is close enough. Data Duplicator, the actual name, is a rather odd command when you look at it. Where most commands would have you order your parameters, dd makes you explicitly state the input and output files.
I eventually dumped the formatted disk straight onto a waiting 1 TB SSD and took it to my tower upstairs. I don’t want any chance of wiping another important drive, so I grabbed the original HDD from ButtonMash, the drive with my first Linux install, and put it in my personal desktop instead of another Windows drive. I tried installing TestDisk from a package, but I was missing dependencies, and Ubuntu didn’t like my USB Wi-Fi dongle (What is it with that machine and OS changes needing different Wi-Fi? I mean, first Win10 hates my internal Wi-Fi card and now this?).
This is where the project lingered while I worked on my Pi 4 Wi-Fi to Ethernet router. I broke down and finished that the easy way shortly after posting about it last, and due to fatigue and a photo chest week, I bumped this post a couple weeks and used something I had in reserve about a scam. I had another one, by the way. This time it was only about half a Bitcoin, but I reported it right away.
With a working Internet solution, I installed TestDisk and let it run. All I know about this utility is that if you’re doing free and open source data recovery, you’re dealing with TestDisk. I didn’t really see another option. I used it to find missing partitions, and I didn’t understand a lick of what I was doing. I ended up giving up and making an ISO file of the original drive over the copy I had made.
ISO copies don’t appear to be readily editable, it seems. I’ve since been working with the main drive. Most of my work toward this project has been the slog through the hard drive, looking for partitions, multiple times over.
I tried burning Win10 recovery CD. which needed a few megabytes more than a single layer, single sided DVD. A new, low-end USB drive has joined the fold, and it’s the biggest thumb drive I now have, weighing in at 16 GB. The ISO Microsoft gave me didn’t work: “operation [sic] not found”. I tried booting to it from my GRUB CD, but was told something or rather was invalid. I also tried some small distro called Trinity Recovery Kit, but again, it’s the right tools in inexperienced hands.
I’m getting tired of this. I want to move on, and doflagie even told me I could be on this for months. I just want to run a general recovery program and see what I can grab from the mess of things I have now, then try again after putting the ISO back for another pass. After that, this project needs to go rest in peace.
Addendum: I was going to make this post a two parter, but in all reality, I’m done with this project. I don’t have enough content for a second half.
I carved out what I could with some program I forget the name of. It combed through the remains of my hard disk and spat out a bunch of files. At least it had the courtesy to separate them by file type, because when I opened the PNG and JPG folders to sift through the ashes with a GUI viewer, my laptop chugged at tens of thousands of tiny, little files.
I had to learn the find command to weed out the smaller ones. I figure in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, it can fully replace all functions you would expect from a GUI file viewer except actually generating a preview. One little adventure here was when I had around 22,000 or so PNG’s larger than one kilobyte , roughly 50,000 PNG’s total, yet 0 of those were smaller that 1k. The difference were exactly at 1k.
Another small adventure was when I moved the 1k files into their folder, but then it tried moving each file over and over again in an infinite loop. I immediately knew I was dealing with a recursive directory error.
When I finally went and combed through the reasonably sized PNG’s it was mostly stuff I probably had lying around in a cache or swap at some time. Other bits were system icons like for forward or back. The JPG folder looks more promising, so I hope to recover more memories from there.
I’m done with this project. As with a few of my other projects, I need to release this one before all progress possible is made. Data recovery is expensive for a reason. I’ve done what it’s worth it to salvage things. Any additional data the professionals might glean from my drive isn’t worth it.
Final Question: What projects have you had to lay to rest with no intent to ever finish?