On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 03:46:43PM +0100, Lars Noschinski wrote: > I have got a hard disk which was damaged by a fall and would like to > recover a few files from that. (There is a backup for most of the > data, but a handful of recent files are missing. These are important > enough to spend some time on them, but not for paying a professional > data recovery service). > > Using GNU ddrescue I was able to read 99.8% of an ext3(or 4?) > partition, so there's hope the data is still there. Unfortunately, > some key parts of the file system seem to be damaged, so e2fsck fails: > > - ------------------------------ > % ddrescuelog -l- -b4096 sdd5.ddrescue.log > badblocks.sdd5.4096 > % e2fsck -b 20480000 -v -f -L badblocks.sdd5.4096 sdd5 > [...] > Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes > Block 1 in the primary group descriptors is on the bad block list > > If the block is really bad, the filesystem can not be fixed. > You can remove this block from the bad block list and hope > that the block is really OK. But there are no guarantees. > - ------------------------------ > [at 20480000 there seems to be an intact superblock; got the number > (and the block size) from 'mke2fs -n'] What I'd suggest doing is making a complete copy of the disk using ddrescue to a known good disk, and then run e2fsck on that. It's going to be simplest, most foolproof way to recover the data. Yes it will take a while, but you can let it run overnight... - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html