Data recovery from a SeaGate ST34572WD (HPUX 10.20)

[Greg Armstrong]

While attempting to recover data from a hard drive, brought in for eval, a
co-worker inadvertenly configured it as a new file system via SAM.

No further damage has been done (if that was not enough).

Is there anyone out there who may know how to extract common ASCII files that
(I hope) are still on the drive?

When I try to do an IMPORT on the drive, it shows as unrecognized.

If it comes to it, is there a tool out there that will allow me to 'scan' for
ASCII text and such as that.

Any help you may provide would be greatly appreciated
Thanks in advance.

[Erwin Dillard]

Greg, There are a few things I need to respond to. First the disc showing as
"unrecognized". Make sure the drive still has the correct firmware, if HP it
should be HP03. Seagate has a webpage that offers support,
http://www.seagate/support/index.html. Also third party companies specialize in
recovering data from disc drives, so you may want to contact one of these
companies, but of course they charge for their services. If you have software
contract service from HP you may want to open a software call for HP UNIX
assistance.

[Nelson Broskey_2]

Two data recovery companies that may be of help are:
Drivesavers Inc. 1 800 440 1904
Ontrack Data Recovery 1 800 650 2410

[Michael Lampi]

A "brute force and ignorance" method to scan a disk drive for ASCII text could be to use the "dd" and "strings" commands.

dd can be used to seek to particular locations and extract a specified number of blocks.

strings can be used to display whatever ASCII text might be present.

If you don't care about disk addresses, then the "cat /dev/rdsk/xxxxx | strings" command, where the appropriate character device special file is specified, could be used to dump the entire drive.