Still behind on ... well, life. Behind on lots of projects, behind on LJ/DW/IJ/etc. readiing, obviously behind on posting, behind on email ... Not sure when I'll start to catch up. But in the meantime:
I put the old hard drive from my Mac into a USB enclosure just to see whether it was Completely Dead or Mostly Dead. Well ... Disk Utility can see and identify it, but cannot repair it, nor copy it. Using dd(1) from the command line, I can copy a little bit at a time, then dd stops with an I/O error; starting it again with a "skip=" parameter gets me another chunk, and so on. (I also tried fsck(8), which said the superblock magic number was wrong and couldn't find an alternate superblock on its own.)
So I can apparently read parts of the disk, but what I'm copying will have holes in it.
To try to recover info from the drive more efficiently (or at least more conveniently) -- and/or to try to reconstruct MP3, JPEG, TIFF, and HTML files from the partial-disk-image-chunks, what tools should I STFW for? (Okay, I know I can use strings(1) to search for HTML...) Or is this going to be a yak-shaving exercise where I start by refreshing my fuzzy memory of the structure of an inode and start cobbling together my own tools in C?
A bunch of directories were in my Dropbox folder, so I got those back right away (about 600 MB). Another few gig, I was eventually able to read from the DVD I'd been in the process of burning when the old drive stopped being helpful (I couldn't read it on the Mac's internal optical drive, nor with an external USB DVD drive on the Mac -- I had to attach the USB DVD to a WinXP box and mount it as a Samba volume (once I found out that the Mac's Ethernet port automatically senses when a crossover cable ought to have been used and reconfigures itself accordingly, which is awfully convenient)). But there were a bunch of directories I wasn't able to copy in time, and a couple of those contained files it would be really good to be able to recover.
"The problem is that the vast majority of the issues brought up by the tea party types and Palin are idiotic. These aren't people with the traditional lower-middle class concerns of Americans (which is my family background) but instead these are people who largely believe the conspiracy du jour, whether that involves secret armies, the president's 'true' nationality, or Nancy Pelosi's 'death panels' that are set up to pull the plug on Grandma.
"While the concerns of many white, middle-class people are worthy causes and should be addressed by liberals (and are), it is not elitism to treat this roving band of conspiracy nuts for the cretins they are or associate with. This would be akin to President Johnson in 1964 undertaking a federal committee to study the mind control powers of fluoridated water. That would be asinine."
-- Oliver Willis, 2009-11-13, Salon
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