[YLUG] recovering partition table

[Patrick Dupre]

Wiat a minute,

May be their is one point that I did not get !

Sure, I did not have a blank drive, but I do see what else I could have
done by cloning the drive. Right now I am trying to save one, the other 
one is still pending, I will decide what to do according the success that 
I have with the first one.
Till now, I have done only 2 operations which are not reversible:
testdisk and the restoration of the first partition (swap).
Without testdisk, their was nothing that I could do. In addition, the
information that I got from testdisk was correct.
Doing dd if=  of= from one partition to another partition on another
disk cannot damage the first disk !
Then I can do a fsck on the new partition.
That way the recovering is just painfull because I have to guess the
first directory of the hierarchie (in fact it really painfull for /usr/lib
because of the number of directories).
At the end, for the OS, I will see if my work is OK. by booting the 
machine, but I still have the option of the checking the installation.
Their is 2 directories that I really need to recover: /home and /backup.
But again, even if I fail I still have the original disk. But I really
fails, I do not see the option. Nobody came with one !

For the other disk I even have copy of the partition table, and I
can check if it matches the information that I have and attribue
properly the cylinders.

Again, I do not see what is wrong in what I am doing !


  > John and Roger have already tried to explain why this is the wrong
> thing to do, but you persist.
>
> You MUST copy the ENTIRE disk to a physically separate one.
>
> MUST.
>
> And you must do this before you do anything else.
>
> If you don't have another physical disk (a USB one will do), stop, and
> wait until you have one. PC World is probably still open now. It'll
> certainly be open tomorrow morning.
>
> Anything else is assumes that you don't care about the data on the
> disk. And if you don't, why are you bothering doing this?
>
> Arthur
>
> On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Patrick Dupre<pd520 at york.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>
>> If I am correct:
>> dd if=/dev/sdd5 of=/dev/VG2/tmp works if /dev/VG2/tmp is an unmounted
>> partition, but if of=/tmp/sdd5 is a file on aa mounted /tmp partition,
>> if does not work !
>> All the partition are ext3 (except the swap sdd1)
>
>

-- 
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  Patrick DUPRÉ                      |   |
  Department of Chemistry            |   |    Phone: (44)-(0)-1904-434384
  The University of York             |   |    Fax:   (44)-(0)-1904-432516
  Heslington                         |   |
  York YO10 5DD  United Kingdom      |   |    email: pd520 at york.ac.uk
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