Data recovery pain January 6
I just received a package containing two of the most expensive dvds I’ve ever held. One of my clients’ servers had a hard drive crash, and these dvds are the results of sending the drive to Ontrack for data recovery. I’ve been less than impressed with Ontrack, having refered them to my client, as I assumed they had the best reputation for data recovery. They’ve been exteremely slow, overshooting their estimate by 3-4 times, and extremely expensive, to the tune of well into 4 figures.
So, sitting here with the dvds in my hands, I figured we were past all the hassles with Ontrack, and that all that was left to do would be to copy the data off the cd and reconstruct it. We got a list ahead of time of what files they were able to recover, so I know theres a fair amount of mysql table rebuilding to be done.
No such luck. I mount the first cd on my linux workstation, and the first file I see is autorun.inf. Not cool. I looked through it a bit more, and found a text file called “CDRestore Instructions.txt”, which starts off:
1. To restore data from the Ontrack discs, the system must have: · An installed Windows operating system (Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, or XP) · Software applications installed · Sufficient space to store the data from the disc(s)
Doh! And the cd even has printed on it “OS - Linux”. Brilliant. So, in order to recover these files, I’d have to mount the dvd on a windows machine, restore the files, then copy them back over to a linux machine. Moreover, the instructions seem to imply that it’s not possible to tell the restore utility where to put the files, effectively spewing them all over the place. Just what I need, a windows box with a /etc directory.
Fortunately, the command “file” came to my rescue and I found that the files were stored as cpio archives, which appears to be an archaic brother of tar. So I’m in the process of restoring to my linux workstation now.