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Backup lost. Partition recovery

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Arno v. Lumig
Hello,

Today I reinstalled my computer (went from FreeBSD to SuSE), so I copied all my files to an other hard drive. I reinstalled, and when I wanted to put back the backup it didn't show up on the hard disk. I put the backup harddisk in several computers with several operating systems and none could see my backup. Is there any more certain way to recover the files, and is it possible to recover (or at least partially) my FreeBSD partition so I can read the data from that hard disk?

The most recent backup available is sept 11 IIRC, and I really don't want to lose 2 months of work!

The "source" hard disk of the backup is a 320GB SATA disk, which once was one big FreeBSD partition. Now it is first a linux-swap, then 20GB of ext3 and then the left over space also ext3.

The backup hard disk can be mounted as NTFS in Linux, but windows does not recognise it as NTFS.

I really hope someone can help me with this, I really need this data!

Thanks in advance. The one who solves my problem will get all my frih$'s!
muggle
Please be more specific.
What should be the FS of the "backup" drive?
How did you copy your files?
I don’t want to tutor you here, but did you verify (on another comp) that you archive is readable?
You’re saying that you can mount the hard drive as NTFS but your archive is not there – is anything else there? Is it a valid NTFS drive at least according Linux?
Arno v. Lumig
muggle wrote:
Please be more specific.
What should be the FS of the "backup" drive?
How did you copy your files?
I don’t want to tutor you here, but did you verify (on another comp) that you archive is readable?
You’re saying that you can mount the hard drive as NTFS but your archive is not there – is anything else there? Is it a valid NTFS drive at least according Linux?


The FS of the backup drive is, as said in my previous post, NTFS. All data and old backups are still on that drive (and readable), except for the latest backup.
The most recent backup is not readable on any computer (I tried 3 computers).

The problem is mostly solved though. I reformatted my SATA hard disk to UFS (freebsd file system), and bought R-STUDIO 4.2. With this great program we recovered many of the files we had on our computer, but unfortunately not all.
We have also tried to run R-STUDIO over the backup hard drive, and it did find some files and reported "Serious disk corruption". Also the BIOS gave a message that S.M.A.R.T said that the hard disk was supposed to be "backed up and replaced".
The backup hard drive is definately NTFS, as I've been using it as external backup hard drive for a few years (Back in the days when 160GB whas a REALLY big HD).

So the problem has been resolved for most part. There is just one problem: All file names and the directory structure are lost, and I got around 3000 MS Word documents. It takes a while to find the one you need now Wink

Thanks for your help,
Arno v. Lumig
blueray
Just curious that which OS it have been used to format your SATA hard drive.
I just know that the windows server 2003 r2 formatted drive does't readable on
windows xp sp1. But I haven't tested it on windows xp sp2. Smile
Arno v. Lumig
blueray wrote:
Just curious that which OS it have been used to format your SATA hard drive.
I just know that the windows server 2003 r2 formatted drive does't readable on
windows xp sp1. But I haven't tested it on windows xp sp2. Smile


The SATA disk first was formatted by the FreeBSD installation process, then reformatted by the SuSE installer. Later I formatted it to UFS2 (FreeBSD) again so I could start the recovery by canceling the FBSD installation before data was written.
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