drive recovery of dual-boot system

[Greg Rundlett (freephile)]

I have an internal hard drive that won't boot.

The system (Dell Studio Hybrid) also will not boot from CD-ROM (regardless
of what I do with the boot sequence, F2, BIOS settings etc.)  In fact it
doesn't seem that BIOS settings actually get saved.  But that's another
matter.  I'm concerned with recovering data from the failed drive.  And
obviously using a bootable CD like the System Rescue CD won't work.

I bought an enclosure so that I could read from the drive using my laptop
as the working host.

The bad drive in question is 250GB and has a number of partitions and file
system types:

Disk /dev/sdc: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x50000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1               1           7       56196   de  Dell Utility
/dev/sdc2               8        1966    15728640    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdc3   *        1966        5881    31453961    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdc4            5882       30401   196956900    5  Extended
/dev/sdc5            5882       29402   188932401   83  Linux
/dev/sdc6           29403       30401     8024436   82  Linux swap / Solaris

At first I tried dd_rescue to copy the entire device to a file on an
external 1TB drive.  The device is a dual-boot setup so it has a Windows
partition and a Linux partition (plus factory-installed recovery and
utility partitions).  dd_rescue copied a lot of data but it complained when
I ran fsck on the resulting file:

# fsck -y /media/disk-a/backups/hybrid/backup.img

fsck from util-linux-ng 2.17.2
e2fsck 1.41.11 (14-Mar-2010)
fsck.ext2: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks...
fsck.ext2: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open
/media/disk-a/backups/hybrid/backup.img

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
    e2fsck -b 8193 <device>


This leads me to think that I can't create a backup of the entire device to
a single file if the device is partitioned into multiple file system types.
 So, I'm back to square one.  I'm going to try gnu *ddrescue *and create a
copy of just the Linux partition into a file on the external USB drive.
 Then I'll try mounting that file as a loop device to see if I have my
data.

Is my understanding correct, or should I be able to backup the entire,
multi-filesystem, multi-partition device.  In the latter case, I was going
to restore it to a new drive (still in the mail) and hope that I'd still be
able to dual-boot the system.  If I can only do one OS at a time, then I'm
hoping I won't run into problems trying to install my licensed copy of
windows onto a new hard drive from media that I don't have.


Greg Rundlett
my public PGP key<http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x5E07A26B877CEBF6>
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