Community Matters

Yeah, I know. There is no hard drive. So there’s no way you can hand the defective drive to a recovery service in order to have them recover your data in case of a catastrophic failure. This may seem irrelevant on an eeePC (after all, the SSD in the eeePC is far less likely to break than a regular hard drive). Yet to me this turned into an interesting question when my 8G SDHC card suddenly died and I was trying to figure out how to recover the data that was on this “hard drive”…

The symptoms were very similar to what you get with a defective hard drive. Some sectors can’t be read, access times out, the file system is corrupted, things come to a halt. e2fsck didn’t help at all. Linux simply refused to mount the file system.

Thankfully the amount of irreplaceable data on the drive was small (an encrypted file with passwords and a few keys for my VPN). Linearly reading the partition and walking the directory tree by hand (I love having the source code to my OS - that made it really easy to figure out where to look) quickly got me to the right blocks and they were all intact - no data lost after all. But it was an interesting reminder that data loss is extremely annoying and can create a lot of extra work. I’ll promise myself to be better about backing up my laptop drives from now one - even those that aren’t spinning.

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