[ILUG] PCMCIA partition recovery

[Padraig Brady]

Hugh Mc Gauran wrote:
> Big time help needed here lads.
> A friend of mine deleted the partitions on his 1gb microdrive earlier
> today. It contained a huge amount of valuable project data that he needs
> badly to recover...anyone got any idea of any windows/linux utils or
> companies that could fix this???

Well he probably hasn't overwritten/formatted the partitions
as that would have taken a while and he would have noticed?
So the best thing to do is take an image of the disk and
play with it using gpart &/or loopback. For e.g.

dd bs=32k if=/dev/microdrive of=~/pleaseBeOK
gpart -vgd ~/pleaseBeOK

dev(pleaseBeOK) mss(512)

Primary partition(1)
     type: 131(0x83)(Linux ext2 filesystem)
     size: 2mb #s(4576) s(32-4607)
     chs: (0/1/1)-(8/15/32)d (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)r
     hex: 00 01 01 00 83 0F 20 08 20 00 00 00 E0 11 00 00

Primary partition(2)
     type: 131(0x83)(Linux ext2 filesystem)
     size: 59mb #s(121856) s(4608-126463)
     chs: (9/0/1)-(246/15/32)d (0/0/0)-(0/0/0)r
     hex: 00 00 01 09 83 0F 20 F6 00 12 00 00 00 DC 01 00

The pertinent info here is s(32-4607) & s(4608-126463).
Blocks are 512 bytes so in this e.g. the offsets for
the first and second partitions respectively are:
16384 & 2359296

So to mount the second partition and get your files:

mount -o loop,offset=2359296 ~/pleaseBeOK /phew

Padraig.