Recovery (was Re: serious WANT! Samsung SSD 64g drive ..)

[Joost Schuttelaar]

On Nov 13, 2007, at 2:02 AM, Tony Scharf wrote:

> This is exactly how I backed up the data drive.  I did an image of the
> OS and a copy of the data.  Formatting the data drive instead of the
> backup drive was the error.

And the backup drive was the fresh, empty one...... arghhhhhh!!!

Are your data drives still unmodified after formatting? If your RAID  
striped blocks on the same position on the disk some clever dd'ing  
might result in a recoverable drive.

Say, a file is split into 5 blocks: A, B, C, D & E. If it's put on the  
disks as...

1: A C E
2: B D

And the striper will simply keep alternating disks... then we could  
merge the two disks back into a full disk, and use standard recovery  
software on that.

We could for instance figure out the blocksize of the stripes by  
playing back some blocks as if it were PCM wave data in an audio  
program, and see how big the gaps between audio fragments are.

Then simply DD the two disks alternating block by block (shell  
script!) to a big fresh drive. And then see if recovery helps...

Maybe too much effort :) the Zen of nothingness is also a fine one :)

-- 

Joost Schuttelaar
The Hague, NL