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85 lines
5.3 KiB
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85 lines
5.3 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 656
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Title: HPR0656: My first steps in recovering pictures
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0656/hpr0656.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:28:45
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---
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Hmm.
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Welcome to HDR, my name is Sven and this is my very first podcast.
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So a disclaimer up front maybe, I'm not in the studio or anything, cats are wondering
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around here, a lot of wind outside so you could have some background noises.
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Sorry for that guys, bear with me.
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So the subject, I would like to talk to you about my first steps into data recovery.
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It's not much but at least it gives you guys a head start and saves you some googling.
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So the other day, a friend of mine dropped in with a broken laptop and a broken disk in it
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obviously, with one big question, if I could recover some data and will most notably
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her pictures from the trashed disk.
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I never attempted something like that before, but she had nothing at that point, so what
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was worse than nothing, nothing right?
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So I started googling to find some procedure on how to proceed.
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I stumbled upon parted magic, DD Rescue and Photorec.
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I'm sure there are plenty of tools to choose from, but this is what I used.
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If you guys have some knowledge about other stuff, please let me know with all your other
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greatly appreciated feedback of course.
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But I'm ahead of things, so recovery.
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The first thing you want to do is get as much data from your broken disk as possible and
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well as quickly as you can of course.
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For that, we're going to use DD Rescue.
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It's like the ordinary DD, but it's more resilient when it comes to reading errors.
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It also has some fancy switches to tackle all of that, like direct access, so disabling
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the cache.
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You can read in different directions, it's automatically scales down the block size when
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it encounters problems, fancy stuff.
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You can interrupt DD Rescue and resume at some other time, because when it processes it
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writes a log file in the meantime, along with the image, so it knows exactly where it stopped
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if you choose to interrupt it and you can just resume it where it left off.
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I took a peek on their website and chose to do the recovery in two steps, or well, to
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get an image in two steps, that is.
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First, a quick sweep, in fact, with as target all the good blocks, so you start with getting
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as much good data out of it as possible, then a second sweep, which is going to search
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for recoverable data in the bad sectors.
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After that, you have a nice looking image, or at least on the outside, that is.
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And from then on, you can unleash all these fancy tools to get your data or your files
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out of it.
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Beware that it takes a lot of time to get the image, well, depending on how much damage
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you have to bypass, of course, or well, you have to find your way through that is.
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In my particular case, it took two weeks and a half to complete the second pass.
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But you can, of course, always interrupt the process before you completely finish and
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have a look already.
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Just make sure that you have a lot of this space so you can make a copy of your image first.
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So you always have a backup when something goes wrong, when you're filling around with
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all kinds of utilities in an attempt to get your data out.
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In my particular case, I could already stop and call it day because I was already able
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to mount the disk or the image that is without serious problems.
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It was not a clean mount, but I could mount it so I could get the pictures out of it,
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or at least most of them.
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At that point, my friend was already very, very happy with the results, but well, I wanted
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to continue some more and have a go with photo rack.
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It's short for photo recovery, and the new thing about this is that it doesn't need an
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actual file system.
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It can work on severely damaged file systems or well, unmountable file systems, because
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it goes looking for the file signatures in the data.
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It doesn't care about NTFS or extended whatever.
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It just goes through the data stream and tries to locate the files.
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It points to pictures, but don't worry, it also recovers other files like Word documents,
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for example, but there are a lot of identifiable file types, it recognizes, so if you want something
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recovered, go and have a look, it could be in there as well.
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Two simple tools and you already have a lot of data back, or well, maybe not simple
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tools, but easy to use, that's for sure.
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So while it's part of magic, it's just that I wasn't really willing to give up my machine
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for the recovery for days, weeks, well, I didn't know up front, of course, so no, I figured
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I used this broken laptop to recover its own data.
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That's where a live distro, like part of magic, is really nice, all the tools included
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and you just booted up with standard options.
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It loads everything into RAM, so you get yourself a really quiet system, which can just sit
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in a corner and well, you just wait, so that's what I did, so that's it.
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You take yourself a broken disk, a lot of time, a lot of this space, and some good tools
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like photorec file system checkers, or whatever might cross your path.
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So thanks for listening, maybe until next time, who knows, I'll put some links in the
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show notes, and feedback is of course greatly appreciated, send it to Sven at noblanks.org.
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See you, bye.
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Thank you for listening to HACRA Public Radio, HPR is sponsored by Carol.net, so head on over
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to C-A-R-O dot N-E-C for all of us in need.
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Thank you very much for listening to HACRA Public Radio, and I'll see you in the next video.
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