[mythtv-users] Recovering recordings from corrupted partition

[Torsten Crass]

Hi Jon,

> My suggestion is to go to www.grc.com and buy spinrite6. It's THE hard  
> drive recovery tool for anyone that doesn't want to spent a boatload.  
> It is reasonably priced (I think $25? it's been so long, I can't  
> recall) and I've saved many hard drives from premature data loss with  
> it.

thanks for the advice, but from the (little!) information provided by 
www.grc.com on what exactly this tool is capable of I got the impression 
that spinrite is mainly good for recovering data from physically damaged 
sectors. In fact, I began messing around with my hdd because it begun 
making funny, clicking noises at certain occasions, but I was able to 
recover all but a single one unreadable sector from my 8 GB system 
partition using GNU ddrescue. The problem, however, is...

> Also... I gotta ask, cause you asked me not to... how did this  
> corruption happen?

...that, in spite of double-checking the command I entered, I ended up 
"rescuing" those 8 GB onto the 390 GB recordins partition on the same 
drive -- rather than the partition I had prepared especially for this 
purpose on some spare drive. So I ended up with a physically (probably) 
completely perfect recordings partition which had about 2% of its data 
overwritten -- probably including most of the file system's 
organisational data. This is why I am looking for a method to carve 
stretches of sectors most likely belonging to individual DVB-T mpg files 
out of the partition without relying on any ext3 meta data.

Thanks again for your advice, and best regards from Northern Germany	--

	Torsten