USB Drives — Recovery?

pipingguy writes "Now that 'thumb drives' are so inexpensive (a 1-GB SD card with USB housing/adapter costs about $25), which programs does Slashdot recommend for system recovery? What is the need-to-have software? Additionally, I'd like to get some input on the durability of the newish card reader / adapter devices, as some of them seem to be pretty flimsy (but very useful/flexible as opposed to the old fixed-capacity NAND devices)."

WinPE

[Utopia]

My USB recovery tool is Vista WinPE

You can get it from the WAIK :
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyID=c7d4bc6d-15f3-4284-9123-679830d629f2&Displa yLang=en [microsoft.com]

Re:

[Tetravus]

Nice. I thought that they'd killed the WinPE distro some years back... heck, I was only able to get a copy for use at work by digging through old Microsoft Select subscription CDs as MS _did_ pull it from the download site.

Having a bootable image of Windows is nice, I don't get why they don't advertise it more. In fact, bootable images in general are great. They're what convinced me to switch to Ubuntu for my primary personal system, and allowed me to easily lobby my superiors to consider a Linux rollout in

Re:

[thona]

It is not only not pulled, but now even widely advertised. WinPE is THE isntall method for Vista - in fact, even if you isntall vista from DVD, it first starts a WinPE image to format the hard disc etc. There is FULL documentation AND all the rights to use that :-) Thomas

Thumb Drive

[black6host]

As far as thumb drives go I'd recommend the Titanium Cruzer which comes into up to 2 gig models. I keep mine on my keychan which is outiside on my harley 365 days a year. Rain or shine, and here in Florida we get a lot of rain. I've pretty much abused it much more than I expected to and it's never failed me once. I'll leave others to comment on what to put on it but if you're loadking up a pice of crap that's what your going to have just when you need it at your clients office. Quality tools pay for themselves.

Regards,
Fleet

Re:

[thc69]

Who's the jerk that modded parent Offtopic? kdawson asked "Additionally, I'd like to get some input on the durability of the newish card reader / adapter devices, as some of them seem to be pretty flimsy" and parent wrote that those devices are indeed flimsy and a Titanium Cruzer has survived a rough life.

Personally, I use a cheap Memorex Traveldrive and it survives my pants pocket. I've got USBified versions of Cygwin, Opera, Firefox, Thunderbird, putty, WinSCP, VNC, etc.

However, more importantly, I keep h

Re:

[swv3752]

An Ultimate boot CD is a great tool. I have a regular Cruzer with Oo.org, 7Zip, PuTTY, and Firefox. Even though it is only plastic, it is solid. I also have an old Sony Microvault that has been through the wash a few times. Most flash drives are pretty durable.

The most sturdy of the card readers I have seen was the sony Memorystick Microvault. It was both a flash drive and a card reader. Most card readers are pretty flimsy. besides, you still can only have at most 4 GB, so why not just get a more du

Re:

[tehcyder]

I keep mine on my keychan which is outiside on my harley 365 days a year. Rain or shine

Aren't you worried about your bike being stolen if you leave the keys in it all the time?

Re:

[winnabago]

Additionally, how does he use the USB drive if it is always connected to the motorcycle?!

the same ones you used before...

[skiingyac]

...when you copied to CD/DVD/FTP/SMB/whatever.

why is this on the front page?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/ [pendrivelinux.com]

A good site offering information and links for a variety of USB bootable linux options if your system supports USB booting. There are a lot of sites offering complicated instructions on how to boot linux from a USB key, this one is fairly simple and painless. Once booted up you can copy off critical data unless the HDD is really dead.

Re:

[pipingguy]

My question was based on the fact that these drives are so cheap and large now that you can actually fit a Linux distribution on it, plus a lot of other stuff for thirty bucks. Yes, I have seen the past related Slashdot stories, but the concept of swapping-out SD cards with a thumb drive-sized adapter is new to me.

Or are you claiming that technology stands still and therefore "read the FAQ, luser"?

Re:the same ones you used before...

[Lord Ender]

why is this on the front page?

This may be new to you, but technology changes rapidly. "What's the best tool right now for X" can be asked quarterly and have different answers each time, in some cases.

Re:

[Tim C]

That's true, but we had a "What recovery CDs do you carry with you?" askslashdot just the other day. What does this bring to the discussion that that didn't, other than a tighter size constraint? (Although personally, if I were to carry recovery tools around with me on CD, I'd not want to carry more than 1-2 CDs anyway, making the constraint comparable...)

Re:

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

While most of the software is the same, what this adds is the potential for software that rewrites, and in general just better potential to run things straight from the usb stick. With CDs you tend to want to just copy/install to harddrive to run, which isn't always an option.

Personally, I have my usb thumbdrive plugged in the back of my router and used for storage, and am running samba on the router to share it with the network.

I havn't actually bothered to put much on it yet, but its nice to know I have t

Re:

[LunaticTippy]

You need to turn off autorun. Step 6 only happens if you use autorun or do something stupid.

Re:

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

The only example is something that would be pretty silly to do, but you could keep a disk image and qemu/vmware/virtualpc/whatever on there. Will probably degrade your usb drive pretty quick, but would not work on a cd-r.

I guess just anything where you'd want session/settings to stay portable rather than stick with the computer, like firefox with all your cookies staying on the drive instead of having to disable them all the time.

Re:

[unitron]

"why is this on the front page?"

How about because you can skim over the replies that are stuff you already know until you hit one where someone has gone off on a tangent that generates replies that tell you interesting stuff which you didn't know?

If you have no interest in the topic, expend your time on something else. It's not as though this one story stinks up the entire front page, unlike, say, a Jon Katz posting. :-)

How about...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/27/02 9209 [slashdot.org]

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/04/00 59256 [slashdot.org]

tar

[rehabdoll]

tar.

Re:

[DittoBox]

That's not offtopic, it's just a woefully inadequate description of what he carries on his rescue disk. From the GNU Tar man page:

"GNU tar creates and manipulates archives which are actually collections of many other files; the program provides users with an organized and systematic method for controlling a large amount of data. The name "tar" originally came from the phrase "Tape ARchive", but archives need not (and these days, typically do not) reside on tapes."

http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_ [gnu.org]

Re:

[The Great Pretender]

I thought that he was just using the wonderful British colloquial phrase for 'thanks', oh and no I didn't mod him.

Re:

[value_added]

I thought that he was just using the wonderful British colloquial phrase for 'thanks', oh and no I didn't mod him.

Even funnier is that anyone accustomed to using tar (dump, instead of tar, gets my vote) isn't in the habit of performing "system recovery" in the sense that the question was originally posed, and there is no "need-to-have-software" that isn't already available.

Re:

[jamesborr]

If you are on a Mac, and don't mind using a larger disk for backup, nothing is better then Carbon Copy Cloner. Lost an 80 GB internal drive on my laptop once, Apple had it replaced withing 3 days, I booted from my backup disk (cloned from the original on a weekly basis), copied back, rebooted and within 30 minutes was back to where I was a couple of days before the disk blew up. No restoration activities required, no involved thinking and strategizing, just 30 minutes of unattended, unthinking effort.

Re:

[frdmfghtr]

I had a similar situation arise, but I "lost" the original 40 GB drive when I replaced the drive in my iBook it with an 80 GB unit (yes, I did it myself, and didn't lose any of the bazillion screws I had to remove).

Fortunately (and wisely) I backed up my drive weekly (sometimes more often) using Synchronize X! Pro which will make a bootable backup of your drive. Now, I have a external USB drive so I can't boot from it (Macs won't boot from USB apparently, but will boot from Firewaire drives) so all I did w

Re: tar

[gidds]

Carbon Copy Cloner has saved my bacon, too. But it's not perfect -- like the command-line tool 'ditto' which it uses, it doesn't preserve BSD flags, creation date, or HFS+ extended attributes.

There's a pretty good analysis of the various tools available here [plasticsfuture.org]. The only tool it recommends highly is SuperDuper, which I've since switched to, and had good results with.

(There's another analysis here [dataexpedition.com], which has more mixed feelings.)

System recovery?

[trmj]

To start with, there are even less expensive methods than the one you mention, the first of which that comes to mind being the $10 1gig usb flash drives at microcenter. [microcenter.com]

On to the bit about recovery. You say system recovery, but use those words to link to a usb flash drive. Did you mean recovering data from said flash drive? If so, the data on those works the same way it does on a hard drive. The system deletes a file from the tree, but leaves the data intact until written over. Any standard undelete program will recover files you've simply deleted.

As for backing up your system to a flash drive, I wouldn't recommend it unless you're running a small enough footprint to fit on one. The 8gig flash drive are getting to be reasonably priced, but that's still not enough for most full system backups.

Re:

[harbichidian]

...$10 1gig usb flash drives at microcenter.

This is going to turn into the first slashbuying in history, as the entire audience of slashdot grabs enough for everyone on their holiday list.

Re:

[that this is not und]

No, stuff like that has happened because of Slashdot going way back. Radio Shack closed out this little LCE 'pen' Oscilloscope, for instance, back in about 1998... if I am remembering the details. It disappeared from stock all over the country.

$10 Microcenter flash drives

[jmenezes]

I made the mistake of buying some last time I was in Cambridge, Ma visiting my parents.
They are great sticks, USB 2.0 compatible*, and overall great if you dont mind the fact that they only work at 11mbps.

I contacted the manufacturer, which promptly responded that they would look into it, and never heard back.

In other words, dont waste your money if your time is valuable.

Fire wire harddisk

[Joe The Dragon]

are better when you need to restore a image to a system

USB2 external harddisk - or internal

[billstewart]

I guess there may be some older Macs that have USB1.x and Firewire, but most systems these days have USB2, and if you've got that, you might as well use it for external disks. For a USB flash stick, backing up to internal disk is probably fine, but for backing up the internal disks, there's a lot to be said for external drives on USB (or Firewire).

• External disks have a separate power supply, so if you lose the internal drive because of bad power, the external is usually still safe.
• External USB/FW drives

photorec

[porksoda]

PhotoRec [cgsecurity.org] is data recovery software specifically designed for recovering lost photo files on corrupted memory sticks (CompactFlash, Memory Stick, SecureDigital, SmartMedia, Microdrive, MMC, USB Memory Drives...)

DOS, Win, Linux, Mac versions available here [cgsecurity.org].

Re:

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I will second this. Photorec is excellent - it saved my bacon when my brother-in-law stuck his camera memory card into my computer and the card was accidentally formatted.

However I have seen other failure modes in memory cards where somehow the card "loses" all the sectors. Linux reports the device as being 0 bytes long. I don't know of any software which can recover from that sort of an error. Please let me know if there is some because I have one card which does just that.

Rich.

TestDesk

[Yaksha42]

I've had good luck with TestDisk [cgsecurity.org] when a partition has been deleted.

I was formatting a PC and installing a fresh copy of XP on it. I had backed up all my data onto my thumb drive first. However, when the option to choose the partition to install XP came up, it displayed my thumb drives 1GB partition. I had forgot I had left the thumb drive plugged in, not realizing what the partition was I deleted it (but didn't format). After realizing my mistake I used TestDisk and it recovered all my data.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had excellent experience with Testdisk. My mom had a coworker come to her with a USB flash drive. She had plugged it into her Winbox, and a message popped up saying "This drive needs to be reformatted." She clicked yes, and BAM, all of her un-backed-up files were gone. She went to the tech support people at her place of work, and since they had better things to do, told her she was out of luck.

My mom gave the drive to me and asked if there was anything I could do. I had never had any exprience with res

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

"She went to the tech support people at her place of work, and since they had better things to do, told her she was out of luck."

As an IT worker, never assume that 'we' necessarily have 'better things to do'. Where-as it may appear that it is our own descretion to assist people with a non-business related task.

In most cases we are explicitly restricted from assisting any employee from non-business related tasks. I am not sure you meant to be derogatory with your statement - but bear in mind you may offend

"Easy to use" is really not easy at all.

[sowth]

message popped up saying "This drive needs to be reformatted." She clicked yes, and BAM, all of her un-backed-up files were gone.

What programmer in his right mind would do this? It does not really make things much easier to use, and often causes accidental data loss such as this. I've even seen similar issues on Linux installs--Ubuntu has a warning sticker about the default being to wipe out the hard drive. A friend accedently wiped out his second hard drive with a red hat install and his network drivers

Bootable Flash Drive with Debian installed.

[lky]

The first thing I would do is build a self-contained Debian install, then you can add any tools from the Debian repositories with a simple apt-get.

For examples of how to install and configure everything check out the Howtos [feraga.com] and Automated Installer [feraga.com] at Feraga.com.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not very informative. Cannot expect mod points by throwing a very general suggestion to install something. I could say: First I would install Windows and then find tools to install on it for *whatever* question you asked.

Re:

[shofutex]

Or just use DSL [damnsmalllinux.org]

Re:

[TheRaven64]

Why bother? 1GB is more than enough for a full install of an OS and tools; it wasn't too many years ago that my only hard drive was 1GB, and it triple-booted Linux, Windows NT and DOS.

Re:

[UncleRage]

Have you looked at Damn Small lately?

What exactly leads you to the conclusion that it is not a full OS and tools install?

Granted, you may wish to add an additional tool or so... but DSL is pretty damn complete.

Cross platform

[tcopeland]

One nice thing about these drives is that the filesystems can be read by any OS without hassles. This means we can include both a Mac and a PC binary (and a Linux one, once I get cracking on that) for indi [getindi.com] on a drive and you can move your data from machine to machine with nary a hitch. Good times.

Re:

[Brandybuck]

Except on Windows. I have one USB drive that will crash Windows when it's plugged in, and another that Windows won't attach until I install it's "driver". Both work flawlessly out of the box on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Mac OSX, without any special setup.

Re:

[iangoldby]

One nice thing about these drives is that the filesystems can be read by any OS without hassles.

The reason that most of these drives can be accessed from any OS is that they are usually formatted by the manufacturer with the FAT16 or FAT32 filing system, which is indeed accessible from almost any OS.

Equally, I could take a 250GB USB hard disk, format it with FAT32, and access the files from almost any OS just as I can a thumb drive.

Just to labour the point slightly, I could reformat one of these drives as H

FAT is not Phat

[fm6]

Of course, using the FAT filing system means that most file attributes from other filesystems will get lost when a file is copied there.

That's kind of beside the point, since you don't want to do a by-file copy: you're wasting a little space by allocating trailing blocks and a lot of space by not using compression. You have to use an archiver anyway, and it isn't hard to find one that will preserve all the file attributes you care about.

What's really painful about FAT is that no one file can be more tha

Re:

[iangoldby]

That's kind of beside the point, since you don't want to do a by-file copy

I think you missed my point. I was talking about filesystem formats - the fact that most thumb drives come preformatted with FAT32 (or FAT16), which is the real reason they are cross-platform.

(Yes, of course you'd use an archiver for making archives, but I wasn't talking about that.)

Recovery is for idiots that forgot backups

[javanree]

Why bother waisting time with recovery procedures? Do a proper backup and make a quick install CD, containing needed drivers/apps and such... I made a DVD with my favorite Linux distro, in a subdir a list of RPM's and the important config files , all the extra RPM packages needed are in a private repository online.

ubcd

[Meltir]

Its not exactly designed for thumb drives, but its saved my hide numerous times:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ [ultimatebootcd.com]

Im pretty sure that if you can boot of a thumb drive, it wouldnt take too much to make this work.

I have a copy of the latest version with me at all times, in my wallet, on a mini-cdr.

All freeware tools, including a full fledged linux (Insert linux i think its called),
dozens of msdos utils, net stuff, iirc there were bios flashers in there too at some point.

For windows

[earnest murderer]

Xcopy [microsoft.com] alternatively xxcopy [xxcopy.com] if you're nasty.

Stuff too big? Pipe it into an archiver.

Seriously, proprietary backup applications have been obfuscating and fucking up what these have been doing for years reliably for 99 percent of users.

Re:

[dreamlax]

That will only work when copying to particular media. Backup applications go further too, in that they will make sure all the files are readable before trying to copy, showing you a graphical representation of how much data has been backed up, and so on. Not everyone likes to type on a command line interface, and not everyone knows what a command line interface is.

Programs like Leopard's Time Machine work differently again, showing you snapshots of your hard drive that were taken each day from when you fi

Hiren's BootCD

[aliquis]

I really doubt the legality of this one but Hiren's BootCD [ntlworld.com] must be one of the most complete solutions. SVP [svp.co.uk] also sells real cheap microSD-adapters which can probably make a nice small drive, but microSD-cards are much more expensive than miniSD and SD so maybe it's a bad idea.

Re:

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

That bootcd looks really nice, but for the life of me I can't find a download link.. Am I overlooking something?

Re:

[LunaticTippy]

Just in case you're not joking, it is customary to find a torrent/emule/warez server.

Professional Data Recovery Services

[davidwr]

Most data recovery services can recover data from these devices, as long as the chip is intact and the data is still there.

Be a good Windows user...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and defragment your USB key periodically!

Re:

[imsabbel]

I seriously believe that the only reason linux people never feel the urge to defrag is the fact that their filesystem uses 250k files for a base system anyway, so even if files are fragmented, there is no performance difference between loading from 1000s of files or fragments, as the overhead isnt worse.

Re:

[sowth]

Linux users don't need to defrag drives for the most part. The ext2 filesystem supports fragmentation prevention, so as long as you keep your drive less than about 95% full, you don't have to worry much about fragmented files. Any fragments will likely be huge, so they are not a problem.

Re:

[PenGun]

In general *nix filesytems don't fragment to any great extent. The advantage of a pro level server filesystem is large compared to M$'s standard whore friendly effort. Why fragmentation had to be imported to NTFS is still a mystery, they may not know any better.

    PenGun
  Do What Now ??? ... Standards and Practices !

an emergency kit should contain

[sepelester]

The Ultimate Boot CD [ultimatebootcd.com] (a bit old now, is there a better alternative usable with a USB memory stick?)

and

a Linux Live CD [ubuntu.com]

Re:

[russ1337]

I'm with you on the Linux Live CD. I also find the alternate CD good also seeing as it has some extra features.

(I suggested ubuntu to get rid of that zango thing in my last post and got a -1 troll for my problems. - LOL)

Re:

[Joe The Dragon]

UBCD for Windows http://www.ubcd4win.com/ [ubcd4win.com]

Re:an emergency kit should contain

[Shawn is an Asshole]

There is an Ultimate BootCD for Windows [ubcd4win.com] which is based off of BartPE. I use it regularly and highly recommend it. It includes a good amount of tools and more can be added.

I'd also recommend INSERT [inside-security.de]. It's a Linux LiveCD that includes ntfs-3g (full read/write support), gParted, the Linux-NTFS tools (ntfsclone and ntfsresize being the most useful to me), and others. It has a GUI (fluxbox is the manager).

Recovery is Possible [freshmeat.net] is also excellent and I use the PXE version heavily. My only complaint about it is that it doesn't have ntfs-3g yet. When I need that, or need to resize partitions (gParted) I use INSERT.

barren family

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife and I are having trouble conceiving. What program does Slashdot recommend?

Re:

[Anne Thwacks]

Wifeswapping - a trouble shared is a trouble halved

Re:

[From A Far Away Land]

Go with a USB
-UnSubscribed Baby - one without parents yet.

Re:

[bogado]

Sex usually helps...

The same ones we've always been using...

[toby34a]

In my tech support days, we took walk-ins from all around campus with corrupted floppy drives. We always recommended that they switch over to flash drives to get rid of this constant problem. Then, a few weeks later, someone brought in a 1 GB corrupted flash drive... and we sat there for an hour as BadCopy Pro did its work. Norton Disk Doctor, BadCopy Pro work very well at file recovery from failed disks that say that they need to be reformatted before they are read. They're old tools, to be sure, but t

Distrowatch

[Almahtar]

Distrowatch [distrowatch.com] is a great place to find forensics/recovery distrobutions. When I have to recover a system (be it Windows, Mac, or Linux) I've found that pretty much any Linux liveCD or USB forensics distro will do the trick. From editing/fixing partitions to recovering data from a dead OS to fixing a botched install of an OS the tools are all there.

Re:Distrowatch

[Almahtar]

Oh and on a side note they're great for anonymous use of computers that normally require you to authenticate, provided you have physical access to them. Most network admins don't think of the possibility of bootable USB volumes and thus don't disable it in BIOS. On top of that, most BIOS manufacturers don't think people need an option for disabling booting from a USB disk and don't provide it. Don't have a valid account in this lab but need to check your e-mail? Plug in your USB disk, power down the computer, boot into your USB Linux install, check your mail, and reboot back to normal operation.

Re:

[wytcld]

And most BIOS's will try to boot from the USB disk before trying to boot off whatever they've been explicitly set to? Why? Is this an intentional back door courtesy of the BIOS manufacturers? BIOS's don't just arbitrarily try to boot from everywhere, they have to be pointed to a particular device. So all/most of the USB-capabable BIOS's go to anything/everything connected by USB first, before the hard drives, before the CD/DVD, before the floppy? Weird.

Re:

[Almahtar]

Oddly enough, a fair amount of BIOSes seem to do just that. The ZV6000 series laptops from HP don't even have an option in their boot order to boot from USB, but when I put in a USB disk that's bootable it favors it. Yes, it's a terrible idea on their part, but it still works sometimes.

Re:

[flithm]

Most network admins don't think of the possibility of bootable USB volumes and thus don't disable it in BIOS. On top of that, most BIOS manufacturers don't think people need an option for disabling booting from a USB disk and don't provide it.

I think it's a good idea to carry around a small bootable OS, but I'm not sure it's going to be as useful as you suggest. In fact, my personal experiences directly contradict what you're saying.

ANY sysadmin, even a crappy one, will have thought of this. Every motherb

Intelligent stick

[wile_e_wonka]

I have an Intelligent Stick [google.com]--mine's served me quite well and fits inside my wallet (I don't like things on my keychain).

In case you look at it and think it isn't a USB drive--it is. You can get an adapter to make it look more like a normal USB drive, but then it doesn't fit in your wallet!

Re:

[wile_e_wonka]

I just realized, ummm--and yes, depending where I put it in my wallet, you can see the outline of the devise on the outside of my wallet.

Some people have round outlines on their wallets . . . geeks have USB stick outlines on theirs. . . .

Re:

[fm6]

(I don't like things on my keychain)

So where do you put your keys?

syslinux

[Meeuw]

My USB drive is filled with bootable images for syslinux [zytor.com], you can load kernels and boot floppy / harddisk images using memdisk. I partitioned [zytor.com] my USB drive as a ZIP drive for improved BIOS booting. I currently have different Fedora kickstart options, a Fedora Rescue, Gentoo LiveUSB, memdisk86, Seagate Discwizard and Dell Diagnostics.

Re:

[z_gringo]

That is awesome. I would really like to get a decent linux bootable image on one and carry it around with me. One that could read NTFS partitions, and if possible one with that NT password recovery utility written on it. When I get some more free time, I will work on that.

Card Readers.

[twitter]

System recovery from USB sounds good, but I've never used it. CDs are still cheaper and easier. I can see it being the way of the future, avoiding the CD writing stage, but most machines still work better with CDs. The recovery tools for me are still Knoppix and Debian images. Apart from the recent AMD intiramfs tools problem, I have not had a system fail in years. The real future is systems that simply don't fail and need to be "recovered." Outside of system recovery, I make lots of use of flash memor

The Future is Now

[SpaceLifeForm]

The real future is systems that simply don't fail and need to be "recovered."

It's the Microsoft machines that have 99% of the problems.

And most of the tools that have been mentioned here are for 'fixing' Windows machines.

Kick the Microsoft addiction, the withdrawal is worth it.

Re:

[trewornan]

Fortunately I have been blessed with a mind of my own and do not require instruction on the content or manner of any statements I chose to make. If you wish to slavishly follow someone elses idea of what is appropriate in a discussion involving Linux that is entirely your perogative - I do not feel any such obligation.

OnTrack.com

[alchemist68]

http://www.ontrack.com/ [ontrack.com]

This company can recovery almost anything, for a price, I suppose it depends on how important your data is. For me, a year ago my LaCie 320 GB Big Disk Extreme striped RAID array failed (one drive burned-out). Normally, if the drive was one single hard drive, it would have cost a very affordable $700-$800, however, the striped RAID array required disassembling two drives, removing the platters, reading them inside a clean-room environment, splicing back together my data, and plac

Re:

[lessthanjakejohn]

and Raid 1,2,3,4,or 5 would have cost you much less!

Re:

[sydsavage]

Which is why RAID 0 (striped) is exactly wrong for this type of use. It's not like you need 90 MB/s to load your thesis. A document this important should be stored on either a RAID 1 (mirrored) or RAID 5 (parity) drive, besides being frequently backed up to something else like CD, DVD or tape.

And it appears you didn't learn your lesson, replacing your drive with another striped set.

Striped disk sets should be used when you actually need absolute speed, like working on large video/multimedia files, but even

Re:

[alchemist68]

I didn't have a choice on to which drive the data was restored. OnTrack selected the drive, not me.

mm cheap backup

[Brill]

now if only compression got better, I could dump movies and jazz on to flash for cheaper than burning CDs/DVDs... backup software? uhmmm meh? who needs software when you can just backup your vital documents? besides my mac boots into single user (unix command-line) mode, that's 99% enough to tackle a problem.

I am not the only one with a story like this:

[hellasaltine]

I put a working 80gig IDE drive into a $30 external enclosure and when Windows XP popped up the USB device install I was so psyched I nearly shit my pants.

An hour later my PC freezes up (as is routine) with the USB drive still mounted.

Upon reboot, the drive refuses to mount.

Many hard disk data recovery tools recovered the files BUT I have yet to find anything that will mount and wipe the drive.

As far as I know it is permanently corrupted. Which seems like it should be impossible but here I am with this piec

Re:

[CaptainDefragged]

Have you looked in disk management? Often thost configurations don't assign a drive letter. If you can see the drive in DM then that is possibly all that is wrong.

Re:

[hellasaltine]

I couldn't find it in Disk Management! Also, when I first went to check out the disk manager, it would hang for minutes unless I unplugged the USB drive. So what I've determined is: 1. It is readable. (As I can reliably recover files from it.) 2. It is somehow unmountable. I know the enclosure is good because I use another drive in it and it works perfectly. If I could just figure out how to mount the bad drive and zap away whatever is corrupting it.

Re:

[fwarren]

Microsoft prodcuts are picky. Once upon a time, back in 2000, I had resized some partitions with a linux tool. After about the 3rd or 4th time I did this, Microsoft products would not recognize the drive or partition table.

From a boot. floppy, MS DOS 3.x 4.x 5.x 6.x, Win95 and Win98 could not do it. Win 98 on the drive, could not do it. Would lock up tight as a drum about 3 seconds into booting it up.

However Dr Dos, FreeDos and PC Dos could all boot just fine, even let you run fdisk. Microsoft fdisk would n

Re:

[_tognus]

Nah, your data is fine. Windows is just really, really bad at external drives. I kick the power out of mine all the time, and this happens. Here's my fix. You can leave the drive plugged in.

1. Do this registry edit [theeldergeek.com] to force viewing of hidden devices. Reboot.
2. Open Device Manager.
3. Select View > Show hidden devices.

What you will have is a whole heap of devices that are faded (i.e. hidden) under the USB drop down (usually "USB Mass Storgae Device", and also under Disk drives (you should be able to reco

Re:

[jim_deane]

Try removing the drive from the USB enclosure, installing it as the sole drive in a computer, and running DBAN [sourceforge.net].

I had to do that to a laptop drive that just wouldn't recognize in a USB enclosure. Once wiped and formatted, I reinstalled it into the USB enclosure, and it has worked fine ever since.

No good idea why (either the failure or the recovery!).

Re:

[hellasaltine]

The enclosure works well with other IDE drives. But I would like to stick this bad drive in a PC tower when I get the chance.

Checksums

[glas_gow]

md5deep values of /bin /sbin etc. helps me sleep at night, provided I remember to check they match from time to time. As for keeping the binaries on the thumb drive itself, why bother, there are plenty of live-distros that cover just about everything you need for recovery, and even if they don't, it's trivial enough to make one that has exactly what you need.

My drive died last week - Here's what I learned

[user24]

(FYI, I run windows)

normally, I use "restoration"; it's a great application to recover deleted files. It supports all MS operating systems and all MS filesystems, it's small, free and required no installation so you can run it from a floppy, which is nice. I never had any problems with it on various HDDs, USBs, SD cards and XD cards - until:
My USB thumbdrive generated the following error in windows "The drive is not formatted" - oh bugger. But after trying many different applications (and buggering the driv

Firewire drives (equal time dept.)

[solitas]

For Mac users (whose machines can boot from firewire devices) I can recommend the http://www.kanguru.com/fireflash.html [kanguru.com].

My 4gig unit is tough as a brick: hasn't failed me once (i.e. dataloss) and it has helped resurrect machines several times.

(somewhere, sometime, I'd read that that Firewire (400) is faster than USB2 (480) because there's less 'overhead' in the data packets. can anyone verify this?)

Re:

[PenGun]

This is largly true but firewire is a stateless hardware connection and USB is client-server. Essential sustained high bandwith apps should prolly try for firewire.

    PenGun
  Do What Now ??? ... Standards and Practices !

card mini adapters.....

[Phantom_24]

I have the I/O Data Mini SD USB adapter I picked up for $10 from CompUSA for my phone, and the thing is flawless every time. Also giving me the ability, as I upgrade my cards, to use the old ones as flash drives...

Lame article, but some hints nonetheless

[owlstead]

First of all, don't forget that the inexpensive USB-flash cards that are sold are mostly 6 MB read / 3MB write devices, while the more expensive ones are about 25/20 MB respectively. If you want to fill 1/2 GB on a regular basis, I would opt for the faster one (the so called 100X-150X speeds).

The quality of the card readers does not make any difference, it's the flash that stores the backup. The readers can be bought anywhere for about 10 dollars, so what's the problem?

As said, USB-drives are just another b

Acronis TrueImage - Windows + Linux ext3

[cheros]

I use a USB drive and Acronis True Image. It gives me a number of options which I like:

(1) scale: I can back up files, partitions and complete harddisks, even though half of it is Linux (limited to ext3 support, though).
(2) versioning: I can go back to previous versions of files
(3) multi-layer backup: you can also back up to a separate partition, but I didn't do that (not enough space :-) - I always do a full backup to the USB drive.
(3) recovery CD: it can toast a boot CD for you which allows you to boot u