Re: [gentoo-user] Corrupt USB pen drive

[Tim Allingham]

On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 16:38 +0100, Mick wrote:
> On Thursday 17 May 2007 15:45, Dan Farrell wrote:
> > On Thu, 17 May 2007 12:36:25 +0100
> >
> > Mick <michaelkintzios@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> > >
> > > I tried to dd the boot sector so that I can look at it on my hard
> > > drive, but it cannot access /dev/sda.  Is there anything that I can
> > > do with my Gentoo to recover the files on this USB?
> >
> > have you tried reading raw from the device like
> >
> > | dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.image
> >
> > ?  That might do the recovery.  How to get it out of the image is the
> > same problem but once the backup succeeds you can plug it into a
> > windows xp box and reformat, and you will probably end up with the same
> > partition structure as originally.  Then you can try to read the right
> > part of the image out of the image, once you get the numbers from fdisk
> > on the newly formatted drive, and end up with an image of sda1.  From
> > there you should be able to mount sda1 and read out the data, if it
> > isn't corrupted.
>
> Thanks Dan, as I said above I tried to extract the MBR out of it by running:
>
> dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/r1 bs=512
>
> But couldn't access it whatsoever.
>
> > I also am wondering what happened to the partition table.  I bet your
> > coworker has a security-compromised box at home (oh, runs windows?
> > right...)  At any rate, if the data is recoverable, it may be possible
> > to rebuild the partition table if you can find out where the partition
> > started and ended.  People have done it before, i've read online about
> > it.
>

Have you tried examining it physically? I've had a drive behave
similarly before, and it turned out to be an issue with one of the
solder joints on the crystal only having intermittent contact ( was
almost a dry join) - resoldering solved it and let me recover the data

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