What is Digg?66 Comments
- mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -2/+29Preliminary step: Avoid accidently wiping your hard drive.
- chmod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+26su -
cd /
rm -rf *
Perfectly understandable mistake. - TheShrike, on 10/12/2007, -3/+28Oh yeah. I know what you mean. I accidentally wipe my hard drive 3 or more times a week.
- chmod, on 10/12/2007, -6/+22You know, giving some reasons why it is so superior would probably help. Plus, the tools in the article are free. Giving a link and claiming it is better without providing insight is almost meaningless.
- BigManOnCampus, on 10/12/2007, -12/+26Spinrite is far superior.
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm - BigManOnCampus, on 10/12/2007, -3/+17You are correct in that I should have provided more information. Otherwise I sould like a soundbyte man pimping someone's software.
Spinrite is superior because:
1) It will restore your entire hard drive as if nothing ever happened.
2) It will actually "heal" sectors that are physically damaged. i.e., it will recover data from sectors that no other software can possibly read. I realize this sounds incredible, but it is true. The guy who wrote SpinRite is more of a physicist than a pure programmer. He treated Hard Drives as if they were lab instruments and wrote SpinRite in machine language so that it uses every possible method to recover bits from the magnetic domains.
3) It is thorough, and by thorough, I mean it will work for 5 days straight (if necessary) just to make sure all of the data is properly recovered. When I last used it on my sisters busted HD, it only took one night of running.
4) It works on most major filesystems, FAT, FAT32, NTFS, EXT, EXT2, etc..
It's better. Probably a bit pricey, but there's nothing finer. - JohnChapin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11A note for Mac people... and a stab back at a software company whose tech support department has yet to communicate with me. Do NOT buy DiskWarrior from Alsoft for Mac, the program threw out a number of error codes when I installed it, never worked correctly, and I still don't have the physical media copy of the software. I contacted tech support and they never answered my question, told me "All sales were final over the Internet, you were warned twice. We don't offer downloads for demo purposes." (Maybe you should... if it works.)
Meanwhile, I go to ProSoft Engineering and their program fires right up and rescues the files for which I was looking.
Thanks Alsoft for being very customer unfriendly, and I hope someone in your company sees this and realizes that you lost more than $80 by ignoring a valid customer complaint and responding to a customer with a chilly attitude. - dwnwrd, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12The headline is misleading. The article does not discuss a scenario where the user has actually "wiped" his drive, only repartitioned and formatted it. If a drive is truly wiped (using DBAN, killdisk, etc.) then these tools are useless.
- RandomSkratch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9See I could have sworn you were about to edit a text file there but wow...I can really see where the confusion comes into play.
- katsanes, on 01/30/2008, -4/+12How do you "accidently" wipe a hard drive anyhow?
- crilen007, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I don't think that works if you erased TimeMachine too.
- Mischa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I had a large video editing project that resulted in over a Terabyte of stuff, from raw video, photoshop files, premiere/afx projects, renders, txt files, you name it. It was on a raid array of drives. I went away on vacation for a week, come back and the computer is gone.
Someone used the computer, had a problem, called tech, and they wiped the raid clean. Striped it, they said? Totally unrecoverable.
I ran RECOVER MY FILES from recovermyfiles.com, and it took over 13 days of searching through the clean drive, and another day of recovery, and I had the full terabyte back, not a file missing. - cwalk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I don't think the author actually wiped his drive, it just seems as though he re-partitioned and formatted. My wipe utility of choice is Eraser (free) http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/ and recovery utility of choice is Active Undelete (not free) http://www.active-undelete.com/
- nogami, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7I dunno, I lost a lot of respect for Steve Gibson after his Microsoft Backdoor fiasco on Security Now (amongst others)... I'm still not convinced that spinrite isn't a lot of snakeoil that's marketed well.
As I understand it, spinrite is also not a file recovery program, but attempts to repair/remap bad sectors on the drive/media.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
N. - Tobey, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7That title makes it sound like accidentally wiping a hard drive is a common occurrence...
- Cyberdactyl, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Hehe, I got a laugh on his "methods" of preventing file recovery if you don't want to save the disk, like most of us couldn't figure out how to destroy a HD and needed help figuring out a method for destruction.
Why not include:
Shoot it with a 357
Throw it off a 50 story building onto pavement
Throw into a bridge column going 75mph
Drop a nuke on it.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I have a hard drive that is pretty effed up and I can't even get the files off unless i do a raw-recovery (which makes just corrupted files...thanks ontrack). If this works, I'm donating $20 to NJShadow and $30 to the guy who wrote the article.
Off i go to try. - BigManOnCampus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4You are correct in that assesment, it does not recover specific files. However, if you have "accidentally wiped" an entire HD (including the directory tree/boot sector, etc..), are you going to look to just recover specific files? I can't imagine a scenario where I would do that.
It may still be snake oil for how it is marketed, for all I know. I just know that it works as a hard drive recovery tool as I have personally used it and been amazed.
btw, link me to these fiascos, as I am ignorant of them. - jambarama, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I've used Spinrite, it is very good. But in my experience, R-Studio is even better than Spinrite at recovering files. It runs inside Windows, but it will recover from an active partition, across the network, or an inactive partition. It does NTFS, FAT, EXT2/3 and I have had really good success with it on flash drives, as well as my dual boot - NTFS / EXT3. It is pretty expensive ($90) but is works great.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@ YoctoYotta
You're so cool. - wbxp99, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I did last week, i really wish i had seen this then
- BlackCow, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3RTFA! He said he mixed up his hard drives.
- Vokas, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Haha you loser, porn is not disgusting!
- foolfromhell, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4You are a ***** noob.
Wiping the Hard-Drive will remove the trace of Time-Machine. Making you have to re-install an OS. This isnt about deleting programs or files. its about ENTIRELY wiping the HDD - CircleFusion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3How might someone accidently delete their harddrive partition? I'll give you one example that occurred about 3 weeks ago.
It was late. I was tired. I was about to reinstall Windows XP Pro on my desktop system. I wasn't using this desktop system as my primary computer (I used my notebook) but I was going to wipe it clean and prepare it for doing schoolwork (no games, extras, etc).
I shut off the computer, put in the XP disk and boot up. The setup program starts. I see that there are multiple partitions listed. I'm tired and I think "hmm, didn't know that I partitioned the hard drive this way. Oh well..." and I removed both partitions. I clicked next and then realized what I had done. My USB backup drive was still connected to the computer and the XP setup program recognized it. I deleted my partition of my backup drive (the one housing the files that I just copied from the system before doing the install.)
So, I went about trying all of the different recovery programs out there. Abou 85% (guesstimate) of them would not tell detailed information on what exactly they recovered. I assume that most of them only recover deleted files and NOT deleted partitions. I didn't want to drop $60 on some software that I'm only likely to use once (this will not happen again). All of the Linux options (liveCD's with recovery apps) didn't support NTFS. I had read that someone recently came out with a NTFS driver for linux, but I couldn't find a linux tool that would actually recover a deleted NTFS partition.
There are a LOT of programs out there for data recovery. As this article author says...
"an exhaustive search of the hard drive for lost partitions yielded too many results."... He's not kidding. The frustrating thing is that many of them are listed with incorrect information, stating that they are free when they really aren't, or that they recover partitions...but they don't, or it turns out that is only in the PRO edition. I ran about 7 programs on the drive and 2 of them were "trial" versions without stating so during the install. I found out they were trial versions after running a full scan of the drive, finding all of my partition information, but refusing to restore it because it's a trial edition. I was quite upset at that. The others either took too long (like overnight+) or didn't recover partitions.
Note, this was late at night and I was very tired....but you can still get the idea that finding a recovery solution is not an easy task. I wouldn't automatically assume that the $300 programs can do what you need either.
So, I am certainly happy for articles like this being shared on Digg. - dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Doubtfull, but computers know that 1x1 pixel image (or anything else used for that matter) isn't where the project file says it is..
- Ben - Yashu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4"Why not include:
Shoot it with a 357
Throw it off a 50 story building onto pavement
Throw into a bridge column going 75mph
Drop a nuke on it."
"What to do when the RIAA subpoenas you" - mitrovarr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3That's an important distinction. Fortunately, I think it's much harder to accidentally destroy a hard drive in such a matter, since you have to know what you're doing to seek such tools out, and usually they are covered in tons of friendly messages of the 'THIS IS TOTALLY AND PERMANENTLY IRREVERSIBLE' sort. More likely is a destroyed file system via malware or unfortunate mistakes (formatting the wrong drive, horrible partition resizing accidents, truly ugly file-system errors, etc.) In which case these sort of tools may help. Not so much as good backups, however.
- cquinnd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2No, the headline is using one of the commonly accepted definitions for "wiping a hard drive" that has been around before DBAN and other such tools gained their current
popularity.
Formatting is like using a clean cloth to wipe the dust off a table before someone checks it for fingerprints. The surface appears clean, but the prints can still be revealed with a little effort.
DBAN is like taking an acid etch to the tabletop. It doesn't just "wipe" the dust away, it resurfaces the medium on which the prints themselves could still exist. - foolfromhell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I have accidentally wiped my main HDD when I was trying to format my secondary HDD to run Linux on.....
- YoctoYotta, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@mrhaines
You've obviously never attempted a formatted reinstall of Windows at 3am, drunk, with an external hard drive stupidly connected. - cquinnd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2 BigManOnCampus,
In my experience with spinrite, if it sees a drive with no partition table information, or a file system that does not look like one it expects (two types of "damage" one might see from an "accidentally wiped" hard drive), it will stop there and attempt no further
analysis or data recovery.
Spinrite is not a data recovery program, it is a sector by sector recovery program, that is dependent on the specific file system(s) it was built to recognize to perform its sector analysis. It is very, very good for what it was designed to do, and I do own
a copies of Spinrite 5 and 6 (see below), but I long ago gave up on the notion that it was equivalent to "data recovery" programs... it is better termed a "drive recovery" program.
And the knowledge the GRC recommends having both versions of the program because there are still some things that Spinrite 5 does better than 6, also makes me approach comments about Spinrites data recovery capabilities with a grain of salt. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I have one PC with 5 200Gb drives. Its VERY easy to get them mixed up, especially during the install of an OS where you can't actually browse the contents of a drive to see if its the one you think it is.
- julielacombe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This article lists a few other alternatives: Hard drive recovery utilities: when you can't afford to lose that data http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2005/12/hard-drive-recovery-utilities-when-you.html
- Coder_TimT, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Well, although not really "wiping" a hard drive, one way to "accidentally" format a partition is to install a smaller Linux distro. that doesn't respect your request to not format certain partitions during the install.
For example, let's say your installing MythDora, a Fedora based MythTV distro. If you have...maybe... a 100GB /home partition and instruct that partition to be preserved, it goes ahead and formats it and creates the default /home/mythtv directory structure.
The moral of the story is to have recent backups of any important data on that /home partitions, especially if that important data is 5GB worth of family photos.
The second moral is that Photorec is a wonderful, free, open source solution that works beautifully to recover said data....even if it resided originally on an XFS formatted partition.
So I'm digging for a good recovery tool and the fact that "accidents" do happen... - alizard, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1If you REALLY have data on your HD that you MUST have access to, back it up.
I do a differential back up using an rsync script to a drive mirror every other day and to a pile of DVD-Rs every month using a dar script. It made life a lot easier for me a few months ago when the hard drive died. - CircleFusion, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Note: I never found a solution. I chose another route because I needed to get the computer ready for school. I found another backup of most of my data, dated by about a month, from another USB drive. My deleted backup drive is just sitting there until I have time to do more research on recovery software. Hopefully, the software in this article will do the trick.
- aximbigfan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2drat... i see this NOW....
a few months ago a simaler thing happened to me. i meant to format the 40gb hdd on my nslu2 (fileserver made by linksys) but instead i accendnatly formatted the 120gb hdd which was the main hdd where i keept all my stuff (the 40 was there because i was going to format it and use it as the boot drive as the 120 was formatted as NTFS) ... attempeted to use testdfisk but in the end i just gave up and fished the files out of varius places on my varius compurers hdds... - Ahnteis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Most of those would allow some (if not most) of the data to be recovered. :D
- hanksname, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This would be a fine article if it ever happened to more than .001% of the kinda dumb population. Most people who lost data do it because the HD goes bad. No software recovery can fix that and if you just call random 'recovery' places they will quote you along the lines of 'how important is it and how much do you have?' and promise nothing.
An article on where to find reasonably priced HD recovery for mechanical failure would be nice. - martincrow1, on 06/29/2009, -0/+1Try Stellar Phoenix File Recovery Software.
http://www.stellarinfo.com/file-recovery.htm
It really works. - DAE51D, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I just don't understand why hard drive companies don't put a ***** 'write protect' jumper or switch on the drive... Floppies have a plastic tab, and old school ones even had that pice of tape to put over the notch. CD's can be made so they can't be re-written too.
I use "old" hard drives (like 40GB as backup drives) -- and sometimes I'll just ghost a drive as a swapable backup. Tape backup is dead or dying and way too expensive for the speed and size and hassle.
It's just stupid really. How hard is it to put a jumper and if that jumper is on or off, then the drive is read-only.
I too have lost data whilst trying to copy from one drive to another. It's frustrating and makes you want to suck on the barrel of your gat. - IconicVoid, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I had the misfortune of discovering that running "rm -rf /*" instead of "rm -rf ./*" from any directory, not just root, will wipe the filesystem clean. Since -r will recurse up to the parent folder. I now use a bash alias for "rm -rf ./*" instead, to avoid the mistake of not typing that one oh so important period.
- Edgen22, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1NJShadow didn't write that, he copied it from the first paragraph of the article. Is it OK if the author said that? Maybe you should notify the author that he's writing things that "no one writes".
- ncraig, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1most of the files i recovered i couldn't open
- ZeroLogic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Dude. Call a pro : )
DriveSavers drivesavers.com - TheReport, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2" I mounted the backup hard drive and discovered that it was empty."
His biggest problem was not checking the backup before he went ahead and erased his main HDD. if you arent going to take all the precautionary measures to ensure that the operation goes as flawlessly as possible then yes this article for you, granted dont get me wrong there are multiple occasions when sheer bad luck blankets ones life and proceeds to ruin everything ever stored on the Hard Drive but in the case of, Backing up and not double checking to make sure everything was backed up correctly I have no Sympathy. - Nature.boy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Three words:
VLC - otcovamoni, on 07/15/2008, -0/+0Hi Mischa, could I have few questions for you regarding data recovering. If you get a chance, I would really appreciate it.. I have the very same problem now, though I wouldn't say the same amount of data :) thanks.....
- tehL1nX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Its better to use 'rm ./ -rf' than 'rm -rf ./'
while its the same thing it helps stop you accidently hitting enter and deleteing the wrong directory -
Show 51 - 65 of 65 discussions
Digg is coming to a city (and computer) near you! Check out all the details on our 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is