testdisk saves the day

Wow, this quick and easy to use package saved the day! Mark this one down for your future emergency reference just in case. This disaster story has a happy ending!

What happened to me was that I started off with using the cp command to copy files directly from a ntfs drive to a usb drive (which had a brand new ext3 partition). The transfer started nicely, however the speed was quite slow and to copy 100GB was going to take about 4 hours by my estimates.
So I restarted with a faster solution. I used the helix boot CD to run AIR: Automatied Image and Restore (a graphical frontend for dd). DD managed to transfer at about 25MB per second. Copying the 180GB hard drive took about 2 hours and 10 minutes. It copied the data nice and fast but I guess in the process I probably did it wrong and borked the partition table.
So I move my usb hard drive to another computer and plug it in. Not only does it not autodetect the drive when I plug it into ubuntu, but when I try to mount the drive as NTFS I get the error: “mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb”. I try out the dmesg | tail suggestion and I read this error message in the output : “[17190438.380000] NTFS-fs error (device sdb): read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Primary boot sector is invalid.” Yikes, what to do… good thing I just didn’t delete the old data on the other pc yet! I look around on the net for a solution. Is there a fsck.ntfs out there? Not that I can find. How about a package to fix the partition table I wonder…. Someone else had posted on a forum that testdisk had ’saved their butt’ too many times to retell. I read on about teskdisk to find out more. Sure enough testdisk is described as :

…powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting your Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy. It works with the
following partitions: FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, Linux, Linux swap (version 1
and 2), NTFS (Windows NT/W2K/2003), BeFS (BeOS), UFS (BSD), JFS, XFS,
and Netware.

Sounds just like what I needed. So I ‘sudo apt-get install testdisk’ and run it. Pure magic! Idiot proof! It took a few minutes to detect and scan the partition I write the fixed partition table and get on with my day. Thanks to Christophe Grenier!

Visit the home page of testdisk here

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