DD image question

[viper1886]

ok so here is the deal, a teacher at my college had some powerpoints and other docs on a flash drive that went south. lost the partition table and wants to be formatted now. i have the flash drive and no windows program will access without formatting it. i used helix(knoppix based) to DD the drive and push that image onto my working flash drive. i have the image and when i less the image it pulls up and shows the files are still there in the clusters. i have no clue how to turn these clusters back into the files they were orginally. im new at using linux and well.. windows helpers aren't usually the brightest people ever... could anyone help me get the info from the dd clusters back into the orginal files? it is only a 135mb drive but he needs some of the files for his class (he didnt back any of them up). any help will be appreciated, thanks

[oz]

Take a look at TestDisk and PhotoRec for system/file recovery:

TestDisk - CGSecurity

Both are found at the same website and they work well together.

You can also get TestDisk on lots of recovery liveCDs, such as PartedMagic.

[i92guboj]

Testdisk is wonderful, if all you have is a messed partition table it might help.

However, operate always on a copy dumped with dd so the original remains untouched, just in case (you can even mount -o loop a raw dd image if you don't have another flash drive to dump the image). Fsck might or might not help as well.

Also, tell your teacher that flash drives are not meant to transport the unique copy of valuable information. They are not secure, they are not trustable, and they have a limited life cycle. In addition, you might as well drop them when you are taking your keys out of your pocket, or you might simply forget them at any random table on at your work or the bar.

[Lostfarmer]

The normal problems with XP is the partitions Boot Record is bad. testdisk can normally fix the problem , but you must select Advanced/ Recover Boot Record. Do read the How-to use first. I would use your dd copy not the teachers flash drive.