On Sat, 5 Aug 2006, Ross Vandegrift wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 05, 2006 at 12:29:43AM +0100, Laurence Darby wrote:
> > BTW, it was actually one disk of nice and fast RAID 0 (so I'm
> > restoring to the one good disk). Does anybody know if data recovery from
> > it would be possible?  I hope *not*, since I'm sending it back under
> > waranty, and I can't erase it cos its dead, although it sounded like
> > the platter might be all scratched up...
> 
> As always, it depends on what you want to pay.  If you have the money
> to burn, just about anything besdies physical platter
> destruction/degaussing can be recovered.  I read an article not that
> long ago about recovering a hard disk that had been burned in a fire.
> 
> I've had quite good luck doing poor man's data recovery.  Boot the
> machine into Knoppix or like ilk and use dd_rescue to copy the disk to
> an image file or another disk.  dd_rescue is smart about skipping
> areas of the disk it cannot read instead of giving up.  It can take a
> long time, but I've recovered quite a bit of data with that sucker.

But this simple methods won't work, as the disk used to be part of a RAID0
setup, and thus contains only half of the data. Then it depends on the stripe
size: the larger it is, the more likely you can find useful pieces of data
(e.g. a complete password or credit card number).

That's the advantage (for the manufacturer) of drive warranty policies: people
who care a lot about the security of their data will never return a drive under
warranty, but just buy a new one instead...

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                                                Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert AT linux-m68k 
DOT org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                                            -- Linus Torvalds