Well, the place in Studio City kept my hard drive for weeks, then finally gave me a quote of $1200 to recover the data. The catch was that there would be no directory structure, and they’d all be renamed, retaining only the file extensions.

I told them that I had no budget to pay someone what I could do for free with photorec, so I went back up to get them Wednesday. I ran photorec overnight, and am now the proud owner of a bazillion numbered files with extensions. Fortunately, one of the main files I was looking for was the VMDK for my virtual Windows installation, and “find” grabbed it quickly. I moved it into the Virtual Box directory, and renamed it Windows10. But when I try to start the machine, I get the message “No bootable media found.”

Any ideas?

[Update a few minutes later]

When I try to add the VMDK to the VM, it “fails to open.”

Sigh…

[Afternoon update]

I wonder if the file was corrupted by the failing drive? And if so, if there is any way to repair it?

[Saturday-morning update]

In looking at the file, it seems to be three orders of magnitude smaller than it should be. It may be that it was either corrupted by the failing drive, or that the photorec recovery was incomplete. Fortunately, it didn’t have much data in it, so I guess I’ll just create a new Windows machine from my existing product key.

So I got the estimate from the recovery company.

The good news: They can recover the files.

The bad news: There will be no directory tree or filenames, just numbered files with extensions.

The worse news: They want a minimum of $1700. That’s if I’m willing to wait weeks. More if I want it sooner, up to five grand$2700.

So have to find another solution. I could probably live without the file names, given that I’m primarily looking for mailboxes, and the virtual Windows machine file.

While I’m waiting to get my disk repaired, I’m trying to get Windows running again as a guest in the machine using VirtualBox. It was working fine until the disk disaster. I have a Windows installation on an SSD, in SATA port 2. But when I try to start the machine, it says no bootable source found. I’d like to tell it /dev/sdc, but there is no way to do so. The manual only talks about pointing to an img file on the host’s hard drive, but not about how to use a physical device (though one would think telling it port 2 would be adequate). This seems like a different procedure than it used to be, when I would have a configuration file telling it where the boot drive was. Has that changed?

[Thursday-afternoon update]

I’m still hoping that my drive will be restored, and that when it does, my virtual Windows installation will work as well, but I’m trying to figure out how to get Windows going in the meantime, because I need it to trade (I’m currently using Patricia’s computer, but she needs it, too). So I thought I’d just install a new machine. Problem is, I don’t have my product key, because it was also in a document on the lost drive. Even though I’ve restored from my notebook from October, and it should be there, I can’t find it. All of the advice I see on line to recover a key requires having the drive that Windows is installed on, so I’m out of luck for that. Do I have any alternative to purchasing another license?

[Bumped]

So I finally got most of the data off the failing drive, and I backed it up to a second new drive. But when I attempt to fix the filesystem I get this:

[root@localhost-live home]

# e2fsck /dev/sdd
e2fsck 1.45.6 (20-Mar-2020)
ext2fs_open2: Bad magic number in super-block
e2fsck: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocks…
e2fsck: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdd

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a valid ext2/ext3/ext4
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2/ext3/ext4
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
or
e2fsck -b 32768

Found a dos partition table in /dev/sdd

**********************************************

Are those the actual superblocks it wants me to try, or just potential examples?

[Update a while later]

OK, when I run it on the partition, instead of the drive, it says the file system is clean.

New problem: When I mount it to /home (where it normally lives on my system), I see nothing in it except lost+found. That’s not encouraging.

[Tuesday-morning update]

For anyone curious, who wants to go through the entrails, I’ve posted the entire session in comments. It remains a mystery to me why none of the drives seem to have data, or how I could have done anything to my source drive that I was trying to rescue.

[Update a few minutes later]

Yes, I clearly screwed the pooch. I accidentally formatted the drive I was trying to rescue.

Welp, I gave up on rescuing that installation, and built a new one with the latest version on a spare 250G SSD. It only took me a couple hours to reinstall most of the software I need, including my virtual Windows machine, which is a lot less time than I wasted trying to get the other one to boot. I also built a shell script to make it easier next time (and we know there will be a next time).

This post and comments were getting to be too much, so I’m starting a new one.

So when we last left our intrepid hero, he couldn’t reinstall grub because the shell wouldn’t talk to the Internet.

So I rebooted the live USB again, and after I did so, I could ping the net. So I went to this suggested page, and tried to do what it said, but his lsblk issues this tree: