Category Archives: Mint

Recover an accidentally wiped hard drive

About 48 hours ago I would have been mystified how anyone could wipe their entire harddrive. On Saturday I attempted to upgrade my installation of Linux Mint from 17.3 to 18. The upgrade path failed so I opted for the recommended path of doing a clean install.

This need not be a big deal. My set up was quite simple:

1. A Solid State Drive (100GB) on which I keep Mint and the software running on Mint.
2. A 2TB hard disk where I keep everything else. (I set up Mint to write Documents, Pictures, Videos etc. to this drive.
(3. I also have a 3TB My Clould to which I save pictures, so I didn’t loose everything)
t2t2
For some reason when installing Mint I chose the option to wipe the 2TB hard drive clean instead of the 100GD SSD.

Fortunately, I had recently read Linux Format’s Round up of rescue distros (Issue 209, April 2016) so I was mildly aware there might be an opportunity to get my data back. I opted to install testdisk.

I’ll cut out some of the things I tried to do, but this is the short version

Open the Linux Terminal (CTRL+ ALT+ T)

sudo apt install testdisk

I then ran a utility inside testdisk called photorec typing into the terminal

photorec

See instructions at: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

After selecting to recover the 2TB disk and choosing a location to save the recovered files then following is in process:

Terminal view (I’m hoping it will not take 24 hours to complete. It said 72 hours about an hour ago!)t5

The program saved the recovered files into these folders.

t7

The obvious issue here is that the recovered files don’t appear with their original file names and the folder structure is not maintained. However, there are some more important issues here:

  1. This has been surprising easy to do. On one hand that is a good thing as it means I’ve got my files back. On the other hand, the ease with which I recovered files demonstrates how insecure the process of wiping a hard drive is. Once anyone gets hold of the hard drive it is amazingly easy to recover anything that was on there.
  2. This process retrieves everything including files I had already deleted and pictures from websites I had visited. For example some of the folders contain pictures of the people I follow on twitter, I did not download these.
  3. When I say retrieves everything I mean everything. Most of the files retrieved are things like web buttons.

t6Anyway the main lessons here are as follows.

  1. Check very carefully before you delete.
  2. It is easierto recover files than I thought:
    a) This is a good thing if you made a mistake.
    b) This is a bad thing it you actually wanted to securely wipe a drive. If you want to wipe a drive so no one else can read it, some research is needed . Deleting your files and reformatting is not enough.

Photorec: Step by step (also works with Windows)

Using python coding to sort out the files afterwards (not tried yet!)

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Linux Mint 17.2 booting problem seemingly solved by installing gdm.

I installed R and R-studio onto my Linux Mint 17.2 installation last night – I have no idea if this related to my present problem. All seemed to go fine with the installation of the packages, but when I turned the computer on this morning it would not boot up. Stubborn as I am I have sought a solution high and low. Whenever I turned on the computer the boot-up sequence would freeze at the Mint logo.

I initially thought I had some sort of graphics driver problem but the solutions mentioned did not work for me. I inadvertently found a solution on an Ubuntu forum (Mint is actually a fork of Ubuntu), by installing gdm (Gnome desktop manager) on Mint.

While the computer was booting I got into the command line. Exact procedures for reaching the command line on boot-up may vary by in my case.

1. Pressed Esc repeatedly on start up
2. Selected Mint recovery mode.
3. Selected reboot to get into the command line:
4. Hold down CTRL+F1

Probably a good idea to make sure everything is up to date

	sudo apt-get update
	sudo apt-get upgrade

 

To install and configure Gnome Desktop: In the terminal type

	sudo agt-get install gdm
	sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm

Then reboot

E.g.

sudo reboot

The Computer then booted up the Gnome rather than the Mint desktop. You should see a list of the users for the Mint installation.

If you login with the default the desktop appears for a micro-second then goes back to the login screen. Instead you need to click the settings icon (it looks like a cog) and select 'Mate'. (I'm using Mate rather than Cinnamon).

Go make to the command terminal to install mdm (Mate Desktop Manager).

Probably a good idea to make sure everything is up to date

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

To install mdm

	
sudo agt-get install mdm
sudo dpkg-reconfigure mdm

At this point mdm was installed and there was no complaint from the computer that it was not installed.
I'm starting to suspect that mdm got installed for some reason I don't understand. (If this is the case I suspect I could have installed and configure mdm directly in the boot-up command line stage without having to install gdm!)

At this point a message comes up to say that you cannot have two desktop managers. Selected the mdm rather than gdm.

I've rebooted a few times and everything seems fine (so far). Disclaimer: I'm not a Linux expert and my job is not in software or IT! don't know why it worked or if it will continue to work.

Just thought I'd share it here anyway.

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