On Last weeks episode I spoke about an easy way to get a little better data piece of mind. This of course was after a horrible, data laziness accident.
My accident wasn’t catastrophic, it was some pictures of the my dog. But they were the only pictures, and of course I wanted salvage them. I tried hooking the hard drive up to an external enclosure and connecting via windows. Boy did that give all sorts of pain to Windows. It saw the drive, and either just said ‘Do you want to format’ NO!!!!! or it just locked up file explorer.
So, the easy way was out. I needed to come up with a better plan. I decided to download DSL Linux. DSL linux is a small linux distribution that can be booted off a CD/USB Stick. Once you boot into it, it has a bunch of tools and utilities for file system exploring, as well as Wifi Sniffers and other utilities that you may want to tinker with, but dont want to set-up configure a whole Linux roll-out.
After some experimentation with copying the files to a good drive, removing that drive, and checking to see that I didn’t copy a corrupted file, I came up with a very smooth and easy method.
First, DSL linux has a FTP Server. I used this as a very easy way to drop files into the DSL RAM home directory, and then I could pull them over to another machine to test for integrity and then copy on over to the sparkling new NAS storage device.
To start the FTP service:
- open a command console in DSL
- change the ftp password: sudo passwd ftp [it prompts for the password]
- from the start menu, you can go System -> Services -> Start FTP
you can now remotely connect to that machine and peruse the file system.
The next step, you need to mount the damaged file drive. Mine was still connected via the USB External Drive Enclosure.
From the command prompt: mount /dev/sda1 (where sda1 is the device, which can be found by poking around in /dev ls /dev | grep sd).
At this point you can either tinker around with allowing the FTP access to that mounted system, or open the DSL File Browser (from the start bar) and copy the files from the damaged drive over to the /home/ftp directory (which is the FTP directory you first attach to).
I initially tried to copy the files in chunks. After 4 days of wrestling with it that way, and coming up with very poor results. I started to do them one by one. Within an hour, I salvaged all my photos and got them stored securely on the NAS.
DSL - you saved my life. Thanks!!!
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