elby

Dont swap HDD's on different byte ordering machines please. Data Loss

Story:
I have a x86 Sun Workstation, which is a little-endian Platform, and I wanted to take a disk with my data on it and place it in a work Sparc Workstation, a big-endian Platform.
Sound simple right, I'm using UFS on the disk, right! right??!!!
 
Well, I should of read this bug and used some common sense:
 
4054544
RFE: wish to support different endian byte order  
 
for Solaris. This is regarding the UFS file system, ANYWAYS in the comments there in this bug report which says:
 
Code:

 
UMM, so what do I do, I yank a disk from Solaris intel and place it in a Solaris sparc station, and proceed to wipe the partition of my data disk.......and my backup data disk...SMART, (this was only because I replied YES to the format question asking me if I wanted to LABEL the HARD DRIVE).  Ha, sometimes its so easy to not even think and just click yes.
 
So the last month, I've been scrambling to recover all this lost data. Which dates back from 98 probably. 10 years of data.
 
Well, after trying to manually recreate the partition table and finding out I wiped out all my superblocks too (Dont run a fsck on a disk and accept changes), I was about to lay down 500 dollars on this program that found all my data.  

This was after using other tools, data carving, etc, to find files. The biggest problem of all,  it would find files, but not one would preserve filenames. Who wants to go through 5k images, sorting, etc, etc.  I guess I could've wrote some code and tried to find it myself, but I have better things to do.

Well, TODAY, this MORNING, I found another software solution that was only 45......
 
If only took me over a month to find it, but it was worth the 450 dollars saved.  Thank you GOOGLE.
So the moral of the story, back your data up, not twice, but three times in different formats. Looking back I should've followed a couple rules.
 
1. Always keep the original media in place and do a COPY to the new machine.
2. backup backup backup (should've had DVD backups)
3. buy a external HDD and keep it around as well.
4. Dont swap HDD's with different architectures, even if its the same OS. Do I really have to say this?

And if you do try to recover your data by hand, do a DD to another drive before trying to recreate the partition table, etc.  My backup disk didnt work w/ the file recovery program after this, luckily I had a backup.....Any by the way, services to get back over 100gbs of data costs a LOT of money.



 

Posted at 10:31PM Jan 13, 2008 by Eric Shobe in Personal  |  Comments[4]