help! can i recover my data?

[greg-SfI3QVg0eaJl57MIdRCFDg at public.gmane.org (Greg Rundlett (freephile))]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 1:29 AM, Greg Rundlett
(freephile)<greg-SfI3QVg0eaJl57MIdRCFDg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 12:05 AM, Greg Rundlett
> (freephile)<greg-SfI3QVg0eaJl57MIdRCFDg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>>
>> But, after trying to boot with noapci and other such boot options the
>> system still would take over 15 minutes to boot with lots of DRDY
>> messages or other ATA errors. ?So, I began to realize that the disk
>> controller itself must be bad and I bought an external hard drive
>> enclosure so that I could mount the disk from a good system. ?Checking
>> to make sure that I bought the right size enclosure, and the right
>> type (SATA v. IDE), I just found out that Enhanced IDE is different
>> from IDE. ?Time to return the IDE enclosure and wait some more to get
>> an EIDE enclosure.
>>
>
> Actually, I did not notice that the drive was fitted with a special
> adapter for the Dell Inspiron 5100 notebook that it came out of. ?That
> adapter turns the 40 pins into a two-sided male tab connector like
> this: http://www.pchub.com/uph/photos/item/6329187330580300002_HA003.jpg
> ?Once you remove the adapter, the drive mates with the enclosure I
> bought because the pins for the EIDE drive are the same as IDE and
> PATA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA
>
> That said, my drive is still not even recognized by sudo fdisk -l or gparted.
>

Apparently the drive enclosure was not fully plugged in.  I
re-assembled the unit and plugged it in more aggressively.  Once I did
that, the OS did see the device, and even the size, but complained
about accessing it.

# fsck -vn /dev/sdd
fsck 1.41.4 (27-Jan-2009)
e2fsck 1.41.4 (27-Jan-2009)
fsck.ext2: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short
read while trying to open /dev/sdd
Could this be a zero-length partition?

undeterred, I used ddrescue
(http://www.debianadmin.com/recover-data-from-a-dead-hard-drive-using-ddrescue.html)
to try recovering parts of the disk.

# ddrescue -v /dev/sdd /media/disk/backups/greg-laptop/recovery.img
/home/greg/logfile

It goes real slow, but so far I've supposedly recovered 4GB


About to copy 160041 MBytes from /dev/sdd to
/media/disk/backups/greg-laptop/recovery.img
    Starting positions: infile = 0 B,  outfile = 0 B
    Copy block size: 128 hard blocks
Hard block size: 512 bytes
Max_retries: 0    Split: yes    Truncate: no

Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
Initial status (read from logfile)
rescued:         0 B,  errsize:       0 B,  errors:       0
Current status
rescued:     3423 MB,  errsize:   1078 MB,  current rate:      885 B/s
   ipos:     4502 MB,   errors:   16522,    average rate:     170 kB/s
   opos:     4502 MB
Copying data...

-- 
Greg Rundlett

nbpt 978-225-8302
m. 978-764-4424
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