My harware woes continue..

[cintyram]

my old machine [ which i built myself ] lasted about 2.5 years.
the hard drive in that machine : 4 years.
it has been the proud home for several test builds and RCS and Betas of different VLs.

But my bad phase started last month.

1. in all my excitement about the new soho release, i created a user account that already existed, so the desktop folder got over written, and with it i lost access to 7 years worth of digital pictures that i had collected. unfortunately for me, the last back up was about 7 months ago:( . [ i know i know, but i was really busy ] )

2. before i could realize my mistake and try to retrieve the lost files [ they are still on the drive some where.. just lost a way to access directly.  Any help here would be really really welcome ]  the machine just stopped working.

3. So i ordered a new mobo from newegg, but no dice, so i returned it, and due to "domestic pressure" had to buy a new machine.  it happened to be a hp- with dual athlon64 4400+ .  The case is awesome.  in general the build quality of the machine is good.
  I asked the guy if i could add both my old drives, one ide 200GB and a newer SATA 300GB in that machine, he said positively yes.  but when i open it, there is only one slot:( so i can only use on now.

4.  My head hangs in shame as i write this, but the new machine comes with Crap-sta pre-installed.
   And i have to deal with its obnoxious UI.  So to relieve myself of the pain, i quickly installed my trusted old drive with all kinds of VL installs on it.  it booted into VL fine but X wouldn't launch. [ same story with ubuntu7] despite trying to reconfigure X through vasm several tiems, and trying all the nvidia drivers, nothing worked. i remember in older VL installs the option to use VESA (or is it MESA? ) the default driver for all cards was available, but not with soho5.8.


5. So short of reinstalling VL again, i am kinda out of options here:(

6. I am not going to recount all the pain i had to go through trying to make Trash-sta work normally.

So yeah if any of you guys can help me get my old pictures which were in a folder on the desktop which got over written, it would be great!!
thanks
cheers
ram




 

[Triarius Fidelis]

Why not manually edit the xorg.conf to use the VESA video driver?

What do you mean when you say that the images are on your drive somewhere, and you can't find them? Are they on another partition or...?

Cheers,
hanu

[nubcnubdo]

I havent used CG Security products myself, but they come well recommended. If nothing else, the literature/documentation may be helpful. For example, the hard drive with valuable data should be set aside and no longer in use. Good luck.

PhotoRec
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

TestDisk
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

[cintyram]

in unix, and in linux, when you rename a file or over write it, the old content is not deleted it is still on the disk. but the i node numbers accessible through that name are changed.
try this:
mkdir hanum
touch hanum/file.txt
echo "hanum is da mizzle " >> hanum/file.txt
mkdir mizzle
mv mizzle hanum

now where did file.txt go? its still on the disk, but is not accessible through hanum/file.txt .
but there should be a way to get it back.

cheers
ram

PS: nubcnubdo: thanks for the links, ill click them in a few mins.

[Triarius Fidelis]

in unix, and in linux, when you rename a file or over write it, the old content is not deleted it is still on the disk. but the i node numbers accessible through that name are changed.
try this:
mkdir hanum
touch hanum/file.txt
echo "hanum is da mizzle " >> hanum/file.txt
mkdir mizzle
mv mizzle hanum

now where did file.txt go? its still on the disk, but is not accessible through hanum/file.txt .
but there should be a way to get it back.

One I deleted a wav file while I encoded it to Ogg Vorbis, and the process continued as normal, though the entry no longer existed.

So I'm familiar with that effect. Hope your orphaned blocks haven't been overwritten... 

[cintyram]

unfortunately i did use the machine for a few hours trying to look for recovery techniques, and generally forgetting that im in the same partition and creating new stuff. but hope is a good thing to have, especially when you don't have the actual solution at hand any way.

[nubcnubdo]

TestDisk is on UBCD, and you can probably find PhotoRec on a generic recovery/boot disk as well.

[cintyram]

Yeah all the live cds contain TestDisk but not  PhotoRec.
the other problem is,  Trash-sta cant recognize my ext2 partions on the other disk.

[newt]

Trash-sta cant recognize my ext2 partions on the other disk.

You may find this little tool handy to access your ext2/ext3 drives via windows: http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs

[nubcnubdo]

Hiren's Boot CD has both TestDisk and PhotoRec.

[cintyram]

Why not manually edit the xorg.conf to use the VESA video driver?

i found an old vl install i hop eits 5.8 std. and edited the xorg.conf manually.
turns out the newer vl SOHO5.8 did not set the PCI BUSID correctly.  i will try and reuse this file in the other install

[cintyram]

about recovery:
i had the ubuntu live cd . so tried it with that.
turns out photorec was a wreck. it did not find any useful pics or data.

but another tool on the ubuntu forums https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

foremost was of help.
that thread is useful, we should make something similar for VL too!!

thanks folks
cheers
ram

[tomh38]

As far as your drives are concerned (and maybe you've thought of this) you could try hooking up the IDE drive through a pci card and the SATA through the other slot.  I have this setup.

Just a thought.

[cintyram]

tom, the issue is that the case has place to hold only two hard drives.
cheers
ram

[tomh38]

d'oh!  sorry about that ... thought it was connector problem

I imagine you've already looked into usb enclosures ...

I should have read your post more closely.

my bad