Hosed ext3 superblock

[gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On 06/02/2010 10:23 AM, Ling Cheung wrote:
> (Pardon the poor formatting below.  Web mail is annoying.)
>
> --- On Wed, 6/2/10, Jerry Feldman<gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>  wrote:
>
>    
>> Just make sure you take an image of that drive so if you
>> screw up your
>> have an out. Additionally, there are data recovery
>> companies that will
>> recover your data. Since the hardware is working, it should
>> be less
>> expensive. If you decide to go this route, make sure you
>> check their
>> reputation. A couple of years ago when one of my HDs died
>> and I was
>> unaware that my backup was corrupted (32-bit system with a
>> virtual
>> machine that screwed it up), I sent the drive to a company
>> in Chicago
>> since the only local companies with good reputations
>> locally were too
>> expensive.
>>      
> I'm doing the fsck on the image of the hard drive now.  It does not look encouraging, and I imagine that I'll have to use a data recovery service.
>
> I was planning on trying out Tech Fusion, since they're conveniently located to me, but I hadn't thought about shopping around to the extent that you did.  How did you check reputations?  And do you recall the Chicago company's name?
>
>
>    
If I recall, Tech Fusion the one place to run away from.  They were the 
first place I contacted, then I checked up on them and got a lot of bad 
vibes. Secondly, a company I was with 20 years ago used them with not 
very good results. The company I ended up using was ESS Data Recovery. 
(http://www.datarecovery.com/). First of all, there was no up front cost 
If they were unsuccessful. The next thing is they sent me the recovered 
data on a larger USB drive than was in the contract, which was a good 
thing. I originally sent my drive to Aero Data Recovery 
(http://www.aerodr.com) as they had a good reputation. They were unable 
to repair my drive, and they sent it to ESS (with my permission at no 
cost). Aero is now owned by ESS.  I can send you a list of the companies 
I researched, but not the results of my search because I did not retain 
those. The main thing I needed was my checkbook, because it would have 
taken me a long time to rebuild all the transactions from my backup. The 
other thing that I was not able to recover from my backup was my email. 
ESS was able to successfully recover 100% of my data, but the cost was 
about $1000. Since your disk probably does not require a clean room you 
may get off cheaper.

-- 
Jerry Feldman<gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846