Linux USB Flash Drive Recovery!!!

Hi Betty!, and to all those LinuxChix and LinuxGuys who need to recover files
or partitions off dead flash drives, usually fried by Windows, or any hard drive
or removable media :-)

Here is the website for the TestDisk and PhotoRec software that
was used to recover your flash drive in Linux at our last LinuxChixLa meeting at
Philippes:

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

It is also available for Windows and Mac OSX.

To install and run TestDisk and PhotoRec In Ubuntu Linux:

“sudo apt-get install testdisk” from a terminal and then run
“sudo testdisk” or “sudo photorec”
Both the photo recovery program and test disk are included in the
debian package.
The PhotoRec software is what was used to recover the files off your
dead flash drive.  It will recover many types of files, not just multimedia :-)

The detailed instructions for running PhotoRec are demonstrated on the
PhotoRec main site:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

TestDIsk/PhotoRec is usually faster at data recovery than Ddrescue, but
Ddrescue is more thorough and efficient:
http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
Ddrescue and fdisk is what I always used to use until Chad gave us the heads-up
on TestDisk :-)

Knoppix Linux Live CD has TestDisk/PhotoRec and Ddrescue already installed!
Here are the instructions for using these utilities in Knoppix:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk#Booting_from_Knoppix.2C_a_Linux_LiveCD

The Ubuntu Rescue Remix Live CD (http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/) is also a great option.  It includes TestDisk and Ddrescue as well.

And the Ultimate Boot CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/), one of my favorite
boot cds, includes TestDisk as well.

Have fun recovering files :-)

/JilliX

This entry was posted by jillix on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 5:11 pm and is filed under And You Did What? Where?, Sharing What Have I Learned, System Administration, Useful Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

4 comments

 No.1 
Betty:

A Big thanks to Jill and Chad for recovering the usb stick and Jill thank again for your blog.

April 24th, 2009 at 8:29 am
 No.2 
Sydneysider:

Thank you so much for this wonderful piece of information. I just helped a mate recover precious private from a screwy thumb drive by installing PhotoRec from Fedora 10 yum. I’ll be encouraging him to donate to the cause!

God Bless you for sharing this wonderful piece of info! Woo hoo!

May 16th, 2009 at 7:07 am

Thanks dear for this really nice information but i should thanks to a recovery tool as well called Stellar Phoenix Linux Recovery which save my ext3 file while my all files got corrupted and i was not able to access them…The software quite helpful and user friendly..

August 9th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
 No.4 
Prasad:

My USB flash drive dint even showup either using testdesk or photorec.Is there any other possibility to recover data and format my USB flash drive.

September 2nd, 2009 at 4:23 am

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