Recovery procedures of NTFS filesystem

William Muriithi william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Tue Jul 1 10:04:29 UTC 2008


Hi,

I do care much and I am planning to follow up with it for as long as
there is progress. So, if you have any suggestion, don´t hestate to
share. I have spent a substantial time reading on data recovery
yesterday and will be installing another 250GB before I can start
using recovery tools. I have the impression that foremost is the best
way to go. I will report back on progress.

Regards,
William
> If you don't care very much, give up now.  There is a lot of work
> needed to do a good recovery at this point I would guess.
>
> | Thanks for encouragement. I am progressing very carefully from here. A
> | question, what exactly does mkfsext3 do? Does it go over all the
> | sectors putting down marking or does it just mess up with partition
> | table? What the main difference between mkfs and formatting?
>
> Onward to your question.
>
> The simplest positive step might be using the fdisk t command to set
> the partition type to an appropriate one for NTFS.  Maybe 0x07.
> This does not change the contents at all.
>
> mkfsext3 writes only a small percentage of the partition.  It puts
> superblocks a few places.  It probably zeros-out inodes.  I don't
> remember how freelists are represented (probably bitmasks) but those
> datastructures will be initialized.  Space allocated for data blocks
> is probably untouched.
>
> So: the NTFS file system will have a bunch of holes punched in it.
> Most of the data will remain.  Accessing it through the normal metadata
> will probably not work well.
>
> Recovery may depend on your ability to distinguish your data from
> junk.  For some folks, something like "strings /dev/sda3" might do the
> job.
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