As i wrote recently (i think) i brazed the power cable stuff directly onto one old harddisc of me (60 GB) because the power pins on that harddisc were broken. Anyway.. Here are two pictures :) (DO NOT DO THIS)

Disc Recovery within Linux

This Article comes with no Warranty – You do everything shown here on your own Risk. It may be possible to sort, repair and recover your Data, see this Article as a help.

i wrote this little Article to provide a little help for those guys who hardly try to get their lost data back like me recently. This Article comes with no warranty :) This Article will also show (evil!) that some data can be easily restored from a harddisc even if you deleted all files and even if you made new partitions. Surely, a good company or good people who are used to restore data will prolly get much more data out than i.

Anyway, i will suggest some tools here, and give some advice how to use them. After i lost some really important files i was searching for ways to restore my data – Here’s the result:

Lost Graphics (jpg) – recoverjpeg

Imagine you don’t have a backup of your stored graphics which are in jpg-format and you want them because they show your pets, family or other things. Or probably digital artwork or photography. Whatever you lost – There is a speedy way to restore such data. Get recoverjpeg from here. Follow the instructions and run it onto the whole disc. Doesn’t matter whether your disc is mounted or not, though you should have it not mounted to not risk that lost data gets overwritten by something else.

Recoverjpeg will try to get all jpegs from that disc and store them in the current directory. So it’s probably better if you do a: mkdir ~/my_restored_pictures && cd ~/my_restored_pictures and run recoverjpeg from there.

Some of the graphics will most likely contain wrong colors, artifacts or are corrupted. Anyway: i was able to bring ~ 40 000 pictures back and most of them are useful. Compared to other tools which i tested recoverjpeg seems to be really fast.

Lost Files (some) – PhotoRec

PhotoRec seems to be a really really nice tool. I’m just a bit curious about some things within PhotoRec but for now i didn’t looked why – there are probably some answers around on their page. The “Estimated” time is “just” wrong. When i started to run PhotoRec on my first disc it has shown “estimated time: 20h”. When i came back 7 hours later it has shown “estimated time: 21h” – When i came back 20 hours later it has shown “estimated time: 17 hours”. So.. if your data is really important, the time doesn’t matter – just run it and hope to get as much as possible. I got a lot of txt files, sorting of them will be nearly impossible (over 50k files) so.. hope that you don’t have important stuff within txt files like i. mp3′s (hey.. totally unimportant to me, though i just wanna note.) are splitted into several files – at least some of them. So listening the mp3′s isn’t really working. Well i could try to “put” them together using some other linux tools, ofc.

Just get PhotoRec from here. As PhotoRec is getting a lot of other files (you can set which filetypes it should try to restore) this is a really helpful tool. I run PhotoRec on the whole disc without defining a filesystem (well i set “other”) and without setting a partition (whole disc). Take a good look at their documentation – it’s well explained. I was able to restore a lot of Data using PhotoRec.

Another .. Way to restore files – foremost

In general, to restore lost data, you need to look at the harddisc in raw format. Without a filesystem layer between. In this raw data you will find everything. Every file (as far as i know) is starting with a specific header, and thus telling you or a tool what file it is. With tools like foremost, who know about these headers, you can restore files. So let’s take a more closer look at foremost.

You can get foremost here, in case it’s not in your distribution. There is by the way another similar tool, though it doesn’t seem to be actively developed (not sure). Anyway, you can give Scalpel a try.

We got a disc as /dev/sdb and want to restore PDFs from this disc using foremost. We would do:
~ mkdir /sicherung/pdfs
~ cd /sicherung/pdfs
~ foremost -v -t pdf -k 500 -b 1024 -o /sicherung/pdfs -i /dev/sdb

Usually you will have created an image from the disc instead of using the disc directly. Tools for this would be ddrescue and dd.

ddrescue can be obtained here in case it’s not in your distribution.

Restore (Repair) archives – (gz) – gzrecovery

gzrecovery can be obtained from here, in case it’s not in your distribution.

Let’s imagine with the above tools we got some .gz files containing a lot of files. These .gz files are broken because some deleted files got overwritten on the disc already or something else happened or the backup tool wasn’t able to restore them fully. We can try to repair this archive using gzrecovery and to get at least some of the files within that .gz back. Look at the documentation of gzrecovery to do so.

Other useful things and links

(Article) de – at LinuxUser about dd_rescue
(Article) de – at LinuxUser about correct delete of files
(Article) de – Wiki of Ubuntu about data recovery
(Tools) en – Allin1 for sleuthkit
(Tools) en – sleuthkit
(Linklist) en – useful links about datarecovery

Should be enough to give you a help.

Conclusion?

I was really curious about the fact that it was THAT easy to restore most of my data. I expected some black magic or something. Anyway, combined with the fact that i used 3 (5 discs at all) old harddiscs to restore some other data which i probably deleted in the past – I got nearly everything back. Anyway, you shouldn’t consider your old harddiscs as backups.. though i’m happy that i didn’t trashed them :)

The fact, that it was that easy to restore my data, is opening my eyes a bit more. Now i know for example that if i give out my harddiscs, even if i “quickformat” or create a linux filesys or if i make new partitions, people could restore the data on it. Thats .. Evil. By the way.. Just to name some tools to securly erase your harddisc, you could try:

dd of=/dev/hda <<< “HERE-IS-NOTHING-TO-ReStOrE”

though… not sure how “secure” this would be :p Another way to do this is using the “shred” tool. Just google a bit for it. It will first overwrite files to hide it’s content.

After using OpenSolaris now for two weeks or something i started to think about the different licenses and in irc someone said “GPL isn’t free, the CDDL is” i was wondering about this sentence and so i started to look a bit at both licenses. What i found out, is the following link, which i got in IRC. This link is old though very interesting and explains it very good. If i understood it correct, the GPL forces everyone to use the GPL; you have to put all your modifications of a GPLd “thing” under the GPL. Thus you’re forced to use a license; you aren’t really free, as the license is trying to tell you. Though as i’m not a lawyer this could probably be wrong – write me if it’s wrong and i change it :)

copyrights_licenses_and_cddl_illustrated

Anyway. I think the CDDL is much more useful.

Recently Rayne in #linux-forum.de posted a link to an Article, in which they wrote about VMGL. The whole Project seems very interesting and useful (respect!) anyway. I took this Article as a test, as i felt recently into a Problem with OpenSolaris Zones. I use X11 using TCP Connections within a Zone to the X Server of the Host. This works fine for normal Applications, but for more and Games like Urban Terror it’s not enough (30 FPS within the game on quiet good Hardware) – I’m not sure but i think using the Unix Socket would speed this up a lot. But as OpenSolaris Zones are totally different from a simply chroot where i could bind the Unix Socket – All my tries failed. Sym/Hardlinking doesn’t work either (logically as i found out). So for now, as i didn’t found a way to use the Socket, VMGL could probably do this Job.
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Today i wanted to calculate something in bc in OpenSolaris and found out that the guys who made that are very very user-friendly. Because instead of typing quit, i typed in quti and came out, too:

chani@yulivee:~$ bc
q
0
quti
chani@yulivee:~$

After running OpenSolaris some time and Solaris in general it’s time for me to think about this System. It’s a System i really really like, though i’m not sure whether i’ll use it much. But please do me a favour when reading this: It’s probably not conclusive, nor i really wanna compare OSOL/SOL with Linux. It is _not_ Linux. Though FreeBSD, Linux and Windows are the only System with which i CAN compare.

Let’s start at the beginning: The Installation of OpenSolaris went quiet fine, there’s just
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Das Leben ist ne party … aber du hast keine einladung gekriegt *sing*

click

Here are two Screenshots of my gnome desktop within OpenSolaris. On the right side you’ll see a terminal where i issued “zlogin lunar” to login to the Lunar Linux Zone. As you can see on Screenshot 1 – lin is working without any issues. As you can see on Screenshot 2 i’m even able to start x11 apps within that zone and let them run within XOrg in OpenSolaris.

By the way, just in case someone is interested, the background is a graphic from “The Forbidden Kingdom” a film with Jet Li and Jackie Chan. Nice Movie, i like it, though never seen Jet Li in such a funny “art” before :)

Lunar Linux Zone in OpenSolaris

As i’m used to Lunar Linux and i don’t wanna miss it, i looked for a way to use Lunar Linux as a Zone instead of the available CentOS/Fedora thingy. This is the result

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OpenSolaris – the experiment

small side note: This comes without any warranty. I just wrote down, what i made in a more friendly-way for other readers :p

Most guys know me as an very happy linux user. Anyway. As i got already experience with FreeBSD and many Linux Distributions i wanted to try something else. I’m interested into OpenSolaris but i don’t wanna miss my Linux Distribution (I’m using Lunar Linux). Anyway i read that it’s possible to run “Zones” within OpenSolaris, thus i could run the Linux Distribution within OpenSolaris (though a bit limited). One of the things, why i’m very interested into OpenSolaris is the filesystem. As you can see i played around with zfs-fuse within my Linux Install but this wasn’t very useful. Here’s the blog-entry: something about ZFS

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