Question

Hard Disk Restore From DD Image Gone Bad!!!

Asked by: etherbreeze

I was restoring my laptop from a backed up disk image sitting on my server.  I was using a combination of dd and netcat to restore the image to my laptop's hard disk.  I accidentaly used "of=imagename.img" instead of "if=imagename.img", now my backed up image's size reads 0k instead of 80GB!  I'm dropping my question here because I imagine my only hope to recover my data is through the use of the forensic tools found on the Helix live cd.
Prior to sending my laptop's hard disk to the service center for repair, I wrote zeros to the disk to wipe everything clean, then it was returned with factory default software.  Is there any chance I could restore the data that existed before I wrote zeros to the disk?  Or do I have a better chance of trying to restore the image sitting on my server?  I knew the second I accidentally overwrote the backed up image, that I should unmount the partition and create an image of it, but it's a production machine and it that wasn't an option.  I might be able to do it after hours, but by that time I'm sure theres a good chance the physical location of my backed up image's data will be overwritten with other files, etc..
I extremely desperate for some sort of solution.  I greatly appreciate any suggestions anyone may have!!!

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Asked On
2006-05-02 at 14:56:33ID21835574
Tags

dd

,

image

,

restore

Topic

Linux Network Security

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
5

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Answers

 

by: yuriskPosted on 2006-05-03 at 05:26:52ID: 16595464

Let me understand, - you issued on the server, where the only backup image resided
something like: of=imagename.img |netcat ... ? In other words - has it been overwritten on the server or on the laptop ,after downloading through netcat? Has dd written its usual xxxx records in
xxxx records out? without issuing errors?

 

by: etherbreezePosted on 2006-05-03 at 09:20:56ID: 16597658

That's exactly what I did.  The laptop had nothing on it - It was booted to Knoppix, and I ran 'netcat -l -p 10001 | dd of=/dev/hda'.  On the server, I ran 'dd of=image.img | netcat 10.0.10.67 10001'.  Once I issued the command on the server, dd instantly completed on the laptop and the server continued to run the command for about 20 to 30 seconds while I frantically tried to kill the process...  Once it completed, the image on the server read 0k.
DD did return to records in/out with no error - on both the server and laptop.

 

by: RedimidoPosted on 2006-05-16 at 19:45:47ID: 16695982

when your partition is reiserfs, you can restore deleted files using
reiserfsck --rebuild-tree -S -l /root/recovery.log /dev/hdaX

use this howto:
http://www.antrix.net/journal/techtalk/reiserfs_data_recovery_howto.comments

when using ext2, there are tools also. ext3 can be managed as ext2, but once files get undeleted or not, you still need to recover the log data for ext3 to work again.

other fs I frankly don't know

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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