How To Ruin A Weekend In A Few Keystrokes

I’ll start off by saying that I saved a lot of my pictures. I still haven’t saved my music but it is on my ipod so I can probably download it from there even though the man doesn’t want me to.

This is about to get real geeky. Most of you won’t care about this, so I am putting it in an extended entry.

I have an aging Windows XP desktop at home (Avril) that I usually only use when I am too lazy to boot up the lappy. It also sits there all day and chugs along at uploading and downloading and serves as a storehouse for my pictures and the syncs my itunes to my ipod(s). But, she was having a hard time restarting (would take 5 or 6 reboots sometimes before Windows would start) so I decided to install Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows. Before anyone says anything, this in itself did no damage. It was me, all me.

I tried installing Linux and I kept getting weird errors (I install Linux a lot and I had not seen these) and I determined that I just needed a new computer and I would move the drives over to the new system.

Sharon gave me a great deal on a new system (minus hard drives, video card, sound card because I had those) and I went home and happily booted up the new machine. But things were weird with the drives. I had moved everything important to my second hard drive (160GB) so my plan was to install linux on the 80GB drive and then use ntfs-3g to mount the 160gb and all my stuff would be there waiting.

I should have paid more attention to the BIOS Settings because the 80GB was showing up as a slave, not master, and the 160GB wasn’t showing up at all. I thought it odd, but I just thought I would look at the partitions before I installed.

So, I did. It showed me my 80GB drive and so I installed Linux and rebooted. It was having trouble rebooting so I took the drives out and reset the jumpers to get the Master/Slave thing worked out. It gave a weird error so I decided to install again. Went like a charm this time.

I went to dinner with Scrappy and the Strombot at La Parilla. I had a cuban with milanesa. Mmm.

Went home. Decided to mount my second hard drive. Worked. Got a directory listing and it looked an awful lot like linux. That’s not good. Turned off the computer and booted from a live cd (runs linux from cd drive, doesn’t affect hard drive) and started poking around.

Mounted both my drives as read-only (once you realize you have done something like this, stop writing to the hard drive) and looked around. Crap.

Somehow it thought I now had two 80GB drives instead of a 80 and 160. Somehow, the first install had detected the first drive but written to the back up drive. The one with a decade of pictures and music. The one not backed up in any reasonable manner.

The good thing was that only 1.9 GB of the 160GB seemed to have files on it. Since I had caught it early, maybe I could save stuff. But it was late and I figured I would mess up more if I worked on it then.

Went to bed. Oddly, did not dream about linux.

I took a computer forensics course a few months ago and so I had a fairly clear plan on what to do. After reading some forums, I decided to try out a program called PhotoRec. You tell it what kinds of files you are looking for (in my case, .psd .jpg .bmp .png) and it starts scanning the hard drive. It knows what the header of a jpeg looks like and when it comes across one, it copies it to a new location.

So, after scanning for almost 3 hours, I had recovered 11,640 image files. There is no order to these, stuff from last week is along with stuff from seven years ago. Some of these are just icons and such but it looked like it saved a good bit.

So, I am less with the freaking out at this point. I have a huge sorting job on my hands. Hi, Picasa!

Music is my next task. I really don’t want to lose my ratings, but I have come to terms with this. I have so much music (almost 10,000 songs) that I really like the fact that I could shuffle between my thousand top rated.

Oh well.

More later.