On 5/1/2025 9:12 PM, home user via users wrote:
(F-42; stand-alone workstation; Gnome)
Just before trying to upgrade from F-40 to F-41, I did a back-up to a
USB 3 stick.
The upgrade failed.
A local friend gave me a windows-10 box to use. Until I could get the
Fedora workstation adequately restored, I needed to get a few things
off the F-40 back-up onto the windows-10 box.
Attempts to re-install Fedora from Fedora-42 Live Workstation appear
to have completely destroyed the partitioning of the hard drive.
When I inserted the back-up stick into the port, windows-10 told me to
use defender to scan the stick. I did so. I asked for a scan only. I
did not want defender to attempt any repair or other changes.
Defender reported no problems.
But now when I insert the back-up stick into a port on either tower,
it's claimed the back-up stick is un-formatted and empty. Fedora's
"disks" and windows-10 (file browser and defender) agree.
I do not recall which file system the back-up stick was formatted with
beforehand.
How can I recover the back-up (without cost)?
Note that I'm needing to recover the back-up as a whole, not just a
file or 2 from a back-up.
This hit at a v-e-r-y bad time in multiple ways.
This and other things, like f-42 "anaconda", proved c-r-u-s-h-i-n-g,
both to my hard drive and to my brain.
I had to seek off-line help. The first key piece came from a long-time
friend who's been an IT professional for many years, and is better and a
lot more current than me. It took him a while, but he gave me the
"ddrescue" command that got the USB stick's contents into an "img" file
on my hard drive. This was the command:
ddrescue -f -n /dev/sdb backup0624.img
The text search functionality of the "bless" hex editor enabled me to
establish that the contents of at least some files were still intact.
I then turned to a list member off-line. The img file was gzipped and
uploaded to the google drive. The other person downloaded it from
there. He tells me that to recover things, he "just mounted it and used
"tar"". Almost everything was recovered. Only the contents of the last
2 back-ups - just a few files - were lost. I'm also told "There was
nothing physically wrong with the drive".
I thank all who tried to help. I've tagged this thread SOLVED.
--
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