Drive recovery using Linux??

[JosephK]

On 12:20 Tue 04 Mar     , Bart Silverstrim wrote:
> Question about recovery of data.
> 
> I have at my disposal a bootable RIP disk and Ubuntu disk (and Ubuntu 
> system for researching and making CD's :-) ).
> 
> I'm trying to recover data from a panasonic DVR device that captured 
> video to a 20 gig hard disk.  The device "died", and swapping out the 
> drive seemed to get it working, but they need the video off the drive if 
> at all possible.
> 
> I put the drive into a system where I could boot RIP Linux.  It saw the 
> drive as /dev/hda, so the disk apparently spins up and the electronics 
> seem okay.
> 
> I did a p in fdisk, and fdisk reported that there wasn't a partition 
> table so it didn't know what the filesystem was. Apparently by extension 
> there wouldn't be a hda1 to mount.
> 
> I mounted a network share and am performing a dd if=/dev/hda 
> of=/mnt/share/filename.img, which seems to be working without error so far.
> 
> A) I'm hoping to try to pull information off the img file so I don't 
> accidentally damage the drive itself.  Is there a way to mount it or 
> root through it for potential data to be pulled out?
> 
> B) Any ideas or tips on doing recovery of the disk to restore the data 
> on it?  Do Panasonic DVR's use a raw partition of some kind, like (as I 
> understand it) Oracle databases do?
> 
> I'd appreciate any tips or ideas in my hunt for drive recovery methods. 
>    In my experiences Linux has had some of the best available for people 
> who don't have access to clean rooms and equipment that cost more than 
> my house...
> 

Use the loopback option to mount the image file thus:-

$ sudo mkdir /mnt/temp
$ sudo mount -o loop -t ext3 /mnt/share/filename.img /mnt/temp

You can also use this method to mount an iso image
-- 
Regards, Joe