Retrieving backed up files.

[tinmice]

I recently wiped my machine and started with a fresh install of Debian, before I did this I removed my hard drive with my media files on, and copied everything onto a Vista machine.

I'm now trying to get the files back onto the debian machine, but it has been surprisingly difficult.

First of all I tried using an external hard drive, this had issues with differing filesystem formats (ntfs and ext3) so I tried to reformat the hard drive in ext3 and use a driver for the windows machine so that it could read it. while reformatting, there was some kind of error, and now the hard drive wont work on either machine whatsoever. I've tried reformatting it to fat32 & ntfs to get it working again, but no luck.

Next I tried the way that I got the files onto the Vista machine in the first place, I took the drive out and plugged it directly into the Vista machine. the hard drive is now formatted in ext3, rather than ntfs as it was when i backed up the disc. i tried ext2fsd and something similar, but neither would work. finally I used a program called Linux Reader and thought I had managed to copy the files back onto the ext3 linux drive. However, when I mounted the HDD again, there was an error reading it, (bad superblock) so I used fsck on the drive. This then deleted half of the information that I had copied onto it, and locked the rest of it in the 'lost+found' file on the disc. Again. no use.

Finally I tried to connect to the machine over the network using Samba, after hours of playing around, the best I could do is read my home directory from the Vista machine and nothing else.

Any help in getting these files back and fixing any of the above problems would be hugely appreciated as Im edging closer to insanity with every minute.

I've typed in just about every combination of words (samba, vista, share, etc...) into google and read just about every thing i can find and am still none the wiser.

Thank you for reading all this...

[Jonathan183]

Welcome to the forums tinmice

You could always give PartedMagic a try ... you can use it to format the drive and mount the Windows and Linux partitions. This should work provided you can connect the external hard drive to the Windows machine and boot from a CD ... or USB drive.

[tinmice]

Downloaded the live cd, ran the software. Detected the drive ok which is better than windows managed, no suprise. but when i tried reformatting to ntfs, as it is was before, it got 7 mins in then came up with an error saying that /dev/sdc was unreconised, or something similar. The only other thing I can think of doing to correct it is to use the 'wipe' facility, havent set it off yet though as it will take forever and others are using the machine at the moment. any ideas if this will actually work if it cant reformat anyway?

[Jonathan183]

I assume you are formatting the external drive to put the data on. You could connect the drive to any machine which you can boot from the CD to do the formatting ... you may want to try ext3 format for this ... since you are using Linux systems the support is likely to be better than for NTFS.

Ed: I don't know how large the drive is or how much memory the machine has ... but it may also be worth using the boot option which runs from CD rather than loading to RAM.

[tinmice]

The wipe function did not seem to do anything, but left the entire drive as unallocated. I created a new partition on the drive and visParted said that it had been created successfully. Plugged the ext HDD into both computers (one Vista, one Debian) and it does not read on either, nothing seems to have changed. Got a feeling it just might be dead.

[Jonathan183]

Strange that ... I'd try in PartedMagic transferring information to the drive and see if you can read it with PartedMagic. What does

fdisk -l

report from PartedMagic?

[tinmice]

It didnt turn up anything out of the normal, just like it was a normal drive, but it still wouldnt read.

I gave up in the end and have taken it back to be replaced. hopefully this will sort it, thanks for your help, having PartedMagic is a positive, even if everything else has driven me crazy!

Thanks again, much appreciated.

[Jonathan183]

Hopefully you can get things sorted ... PartedMagic certainly comes in handy. Good luck with the data restore.