How to Restore some of a Really Broken Harddisk
So I was unfortunate enough to have a desktop with an IBM Deskstar (Deathstar) hard drive. These are widely known to fail horribly and IBM was even sued over the poor quality of these drives. So one day, my drive wouldn't even boot. It started making the horrible grinding noises so common to these drives. fsck couldn't do a think because not even the inode map was correct. I could mount the drive, but my home directory inode was corrupted and thus everything was hopeless. Or so I thought.
So after much reading on the web, nothing worked. This included freezing, dropping, and rotating the hard drive. Other restore tools failed as well. So with some help from my friends at PDC (Johan Danielsson and Daniel Ahlin) I managed to cobble together a few scripts that could restore a really broken EXT3 partition or hard drive. This includes corrupted directory inodes.
Downloads
So now I'm providing you with 3 scripts and 1 static i386/Linux binary:
- dumpem.sh, a script to dump all inodes from a device. You'll have to edit it for inode extents and device name at a minimum. There is some commented out code for filtering on the basis of executable size, modification time and other things.
- fileem.sh, a script to go through the dumped inodes and attempt to file them into directories based on content.
- nameem.sh, a script to go through the dumped inodes and attempt to name them from dumped directory inodes. This script makes use of the following binary, so make sure it is in your path.
- extract_ext3_dir (static i386 binary) extract_ext3_dir.c (source), C code to try and extract the name from an EXT3 inode.
I should mention again that these tools are for experts only. These have only been tested on an EXT3 filesystem and Worked For Me. Your mileage may vary.
Enjoy,
Philip J. Mucci
Bug Reports
Bugs should be submitted to the author.
Author
These scripts were written by Philip J. Mucci of the Innovative Computing Laboratory while on sabbatical at the Parallel Center for Computers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
Copyright
This software is COMPLETELY OPEN SOURCE. If you incorporate any portion of this software, I would appreciate an acknowledgement in the appropriate places. Should you find this software, please considering making a contribution in the form of hardware, software or plain old cash.