How to recover an integer ext3 partition from a disk with a damaged partition table ?

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Andrea Mastellone wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a broken solid state disk, in facts badblocks has found about a
> hundred of damaged blocks. The most shortcoming is that I have lost the
> partition table too, and I suspect that some bad blocks are in relation
> with the partition table data since testdisk can not write the recovered
> partition table to the disk. Now, I need to rescue a 10 GB ext3
> partition (that is the last one on device).
> 
> So, I would like to use dd (or dd_rescue) to physically transfer the
> partition in a file on an ext3 USB disk, and then mount the file as an
> ext3 partition (like an iso file by means of loopback device, is it
> possible ? how ?).
> 
> Since I am poor experienced with the CHS and LBA notations, someone can
> me confirm this: testdisk signals that the partition begins at 6403, 1
> ,1 and ends at 7798, 254, 63 in CHS notation. Since the disk has 255
> heads and 63 sectors, the corrispective LBA addresses would be 102864258
> and 125290810, isn't it ?
> 
> And, what of these data can I pass to dd (or dd_rescue) in order to
> transfer the partition ?
> 
> Or can you suggest a better way to rescue the partition ?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Andrea
> 
You can not loopback mount then entire drive. But you can mount a
partition as long as you know the offset to it using the offset
option when loop mounting. Read the loop mount options in the mount
man page. Once you use dd-rescue to make an image file of the drive,
you should be able to use all the same tools on the image file as
you would on the drive itself.

Now, if anyone know how to generate the partition devices from an
image file, so you could mount the different partitions without
using the offset option of loop mounting, I would love to hear about it.

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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