DjLizard.net » Data recovery

My hard drive is failing!

DjLizard — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 17:09:41 +0000

My personal hard drive is failing, so I had to go to Digital Doctors and clone it to a new drive, just like old times. Hard drives suck. There's only one bad sector on it but when the system runs across it, all hell breaks loose.

ddrescue is your friend!

While cloning, it was only going 15 to 20 MB/s even on the good parts. I then realized that the -b flag to ddrescue would allow me to force it to go maximum speed. By using -b 4096 it began going 70 to 80 MB/s on the parts of the drive that are working fine.

Don't forget about the good ole data recovery article.

© DjLizard for DjLizard.net, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: clone, ddrescue, failure, hard drives, hd, hdd

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Entitled – Notepad

DjLizard — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 05:40:47 +0000

Welcome to part 1 of 1 of Self-entitlement for dummies: hunting and escaping.

When I left you last I was blathering on about my history and crap. Now I'll tell you what happened that SNAPPED me right back into reality.

Tits McGee entered the shop at 4:00 and was all like "here's the laptop and keyboard for the keyboard replacement" and one of our receptionists was all like "oh hey Mike there's a keyboard replacement" and I was all like "not to mention the keyboard replacement"

But seriously…

(Remember, naughty language ahead. This time I fucking mean it.)
(...)
Read the rest of Entitled – Notepad (1,271 words)

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Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\*

DjLizard — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 04:31:36 +0000

Perform a registry hive recovery using the information in my System Volume Information article for the hive mentioned after CONFIG\ (typically SYSTEM).

Sorry, Windows 2000 users, Microsoft hath cursed thee without an enabled-by-default automatic registry hive backup facility. Try ERUNT, though, and perform similar steps to roll back your failed SYSTEM hive when it inevitably fails.

© DjLizard for DjLizard.net, 2007. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Operating systems, Refresher tip, System Restore

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Data recovery article / Dial-a-fix

DjLizard — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 20:46:00 +0000

I have put up the beginning of my data recovery article on my wiki. It focuses on using Linux and various free tools (ddrescue, smartctl, badblocks, testdisk) to recover data at the software level. It is not really complete, probably contains errors, and is highly opinionated.

If you are an intermediate end-user or a beginner technician, this is a good article for you.

If you see any problems in the article or have constructive criticisms, please email me using the link at the top of the data recovery article.

If you wish to link to my article, link to it using the words "data recovery" to give me some pagerank boost for that phrase :)

If you find it very helpful, send me a donation!

—

Now I'll work on Dial-a-fix again. Oh yeah – I can't do the C version right now, it's too much for me. But I will be giving the Delphi version some organ transplants and you should see a new version of old Dial-a-fix soon. After I get that patch out, I will get back to doing it in C. I will be leveraging the things I've learned about Win32 and C into the Delphi version though, so it hasn't been all for naught.

Also, I won't be writing new Dial-a-fix in C++; it will be written in C, which is more up my alley.

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