Data Recovery Tips and Solutions: Windows, Linux, and BSD

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 370 pages
• Published by: A-List Publishing May 1, 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1931769567
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1931769563
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 0.8 inches
• Weighs: 1.3 pounds

Product Description
This comprehensive manual covers three areas in which system administrators must be proficient to successfully recover data: the structure and operating principles of the most popular file systems, automatic data recovery techniques, and manual recovery techniques used in cases of total data destruction. Data recovery from hard drives and optical storage in Windows, BSD, and Linux file systems is described, as are automatic recovery utilities, manual and automatic recovery of deleted files on ext2/ext3 partitions and NTFS partitions, formatted NTFS partitions and deleted UFS/FFS files, RAID data recovery, media restoration with physical damage, and data loss prevention.


About The Author
Kris Kaspersky is a technical writer and the author of CD Cracking Uncovered, Code Optimization, Hacker Disassembling Uncovered, and Shellcoder's Programming Uncovered.


Reader Reviews
[Review: long] I received the book roughly a week ago. Immediately I went to proceed as I was eagerly waiting for several months for it. I wanted to use the book to brush up and improve my knowledge on data recovery (note the intentially used word "wanted") The book is easy readable *in a novel like style. Most people wont need more than 3-4 days to read through it the first time. Grasping all the deeper meanings might take a bit longer so. O.K first things first. The book - as originally declared - is not for beginners and assumes that you have done your homework, meaning have some experience with system administration and ideally with data recovery too. Also the title states that it describes recovery procedures for Windows/ Linux and BSD note that it is strongly Windows NT/W2k/XP based. The book is devided into 3 major parts: Part 1: Data Recovery Tools Chapter 1: Introduction to Data Recovery (13p.) Chapter 2: Essential Tools (p.43) Chapter 3: How to choose Hard Disks (p.8) Chapter 4: Repairing Hard Disks (p.11) Part 2: Automatic and manual data Recovery from Hard Disks Chapter 5: Concepts of manual data Recovery (p.42) Chapter 6: New Technology File System (NTFS) - Inside and Out (p.41) Chapter 7: NTFS Data Recovery (p.27) Chapter 8 : Data Recovery und Linux/BSD (p.49) Part 3: Optical Storage Data Recovery Chapter 9: Repairing Other Types of media (p.6) Chapter ten Recovering CDs (p.54) Chapter 11: Repairing CD/DVD Drives under Home conditions (p.5) Chapter 12: Distributed information Storage (p.5 ) The first chapter *(sigh) contains some pictures of broken HDD and controllers which show some typical defects *some pictures are to dark printed or contain jokes like "Hard disks are also capable of crying" (p.10+11) ... I was not sure what to think about that. Chapter 2 contains basically a description of some essential tools for data recovery f.e. Bootable OS environments on removable media, Disk editors and finally one file system debugger . The author believes that the best made tool is the one you do yourself. So throughout the book he is giving some ideas and inspirations on how to extend the functions of existing software. How a more flexible approach could be used to create a tool that allows to port drivers from Windows to Linux/ BSD etc. ( Chapter 8, p. 196-204). Most tools are described frankly with a couple of words similar too "...this is my favourite tool...". I was actually hoping for a feature chart comparing the several disk editors- but nothing like that in the book. Chapter 3 starts of stating " ... In reality there are no good and poor manufacturers. Every brand has unfortunate models. ..." (p.55) and then he advices on page 57 "... As you can see from the data in these tables, Samsung appears to be the best manufacturer. However I like many people, have a strong prejudice against it..." .. he then goes on the same page naming the disc makers which have the best chances for data recovery. "Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi, IBM (HGST), Fujitsu 2.5 inch, Toshiba 2.5 inch....". So I am asking myself, what does the author want to say ?? Either there are differences in the manufacturing process or there are not. Anything else is speculation or politics. In Chapter 4 he is describing some technics on how to recover harddisks after hardware failures. Explaining the HDD internals, exchanging the magnetic heads with the switch/preamplifier chip and the importance of the HDD firmware and adaptives. As I am electrical engineer I understand that the technics Kasperskys is describing are extremely difficult to use. You certainly need a certain type of skills, including a calm hand and lots of patience. Therefore most technics described are not practicable or usable for most people. After I read the first 4 chapters I was so disappointed about the contents that I felt its best to throw the book away. That is when I decided to leave the book aside for a day and come back to it after 2 days. So I continued on Chapter 5 and I have to say the second and third part of the book are writen better, but still contain lots of flaws. Kaspersky goes on explaining the historical file system limitations (512MB, 2GB, 8GB etc.) and their reasons, cluster sizes of the file system, initial failure diagnnostics, Master boot record basics. He discusses the MBR format as well as the partition tableformat and explains about Dynamic disks (supported in Windows 2000). And finally several technics to recover the MBR, bootsector and bootloader. Interestingly he doesnt even mention f.e what Grub or Lilo is or the 137GB file system limit some Bioses / OS seem to have. Chapter 6 discusses NTFS in more detail. Kaspersky starts off explaining the NTFS version history and goes from there straight into the nitty gritty bits and peaces of the NTFS . Here is were the book is starting to get finally really interesting. Chapter 7 lets you study how to study the fragmentation mechanics and do a manual and an automatic recovery of data on a NTFS partition f.e after undeleting files, formatting the partition and after "serious damage". Chapter 8 starts off with an approach to port drivers from Windows to Linux / BSD and how such a project could be astoblished, a truly interesting idea !! (p.196-204). He mainly focuses on NTFS,EXT2,EXT3,UFS and UFS2 and mentiones XFS, JFS and Reiserfs (3.x) on a sidenote, probably to show that he hasnt forgotten about them. On page 231 he starts to discuss "Tuning the file system for the best performance" and I was already looking forward to some tweaks how to prevent disasters or make a file system easy to recover, but basically the dicussion ends in a simple Raid how-to. *sigh* So the second part of the book is like a completely different person has actually written it. This part was mostly enjoyable and interesting to read, but lets see what the third part holds for us. Chapter 9 basically describes the altering process of media (CD, ZIP-drive, Magnetic tapes and Flash memory ) and their influence in the recovery process. Chapter ten basically shows how to restore files from CDs and UDF based media (f.e. DVD-RAM drives). He mentiones and discusses the different CD burning modes, DAO, TAO, SAO and CAO, the session modes like single and multisession and their (dis)advantagesand other details. He even discusses on 14 pages how to make a "backup" of a Starforce CD and extends the game so that it can run from harddisk. While I can see that this is certainly a cool hack to know, but I currently fail to see the relevance to Data recovery - especially as such a game is probably cheaper to buy than to invest the time for "recovering" the CD. That was another time when I had to strongly wonder about the book contents. The last two chapters informs the reader which kind of repairings are possible basically within an home enviroment, before its time to call a professional service. Interestingly he discusses file sharing scenarios under "How to Protect information" which I see as two completely different topics. From my experience: I once had to recover a 10GB drive from a close friend. I was unsure which software to use after all I wanted an english interface but the HDD contained Japanese data. After having bought 4 diferent software packs Getdataback from runtime.org worked best for me. Note that the recovery procedure can take long. In my case 8-24 hours were required for this. That machine was a home users machine, so it didnt actually contain to much data. I decide to recover the whole data that Getdataback offered me, so I ended up with roughly 40GB !! Obviously there was some data double or not valid anymore. So now the difficult task became to sort out the true data from the "fake" - old text file versions etc.. I was hoping that Kasperskys book would provide me with some inside info how to approach this, but guess what - no way that it was even mentioned how to approach different languages f.e. in double byte characters. Even several words f.e. like "backup" just dont appear to be in the Index. Whats NOT described in the book: - recovery like tutorials and exercises - Logical damages on FAT 16/32,XFS,JFS, Reiserfs 3+4 - A overview chart for recovery software and their features - A companion side containing a forum and additional info - Explanations on how much data you should expect when recovering f.e a complete 10GB drive - Professional evaluations why a certain recovery software is better than another - an explanation f.e. what the "dd" command is and how it can be used - How to avoid data loss - Evaluation of file systems in regard to best posibilities to recover your data - 32 bit and 64 bit file system differences - How to access / boot / repair a Linux / BSD software raid - The meaning of several appreviatens like BSOD (Blue screen of Death - refering to the screen Windows is showing when it crashed) - Bootloaders like Grub or Lilo etc. This book claims to be aimed at professsionals, however from the inconsistent and incomplete contents I can only recommend it - if at all - to home users for exercising with spare drives. The book fails to deliver on information for professional data recovery. Also The contents should be reordered so that it is more accessable by the actual topics. Kaspersky seems to have a talent to start a new topic in the middle of the paragraph just to reject them seconds later. Thats a bit distracting from what he originally intends to say and requires a lot of concentration from the reader to the original topic. Its also worth nothing that the author mentiones in several parts of the book that f.e. this and this software function can be programmed f.e. within ten minutes as it depends on the persons ability doing it. If this is so, than he should have made some samples and included them on the CD. Summary: It does have some nice bits and peaces inside, which are hidden inside of the text and while mainly describing NTFS and EXT2/EXT3 it is clearly focused towards the mainstream marcet. You will either have a lot of knowledge to immediately put the hints to use or will need to experiment to find out what the author really wanted to point out. The author tries to squeeze a wide topic into this 325 pages (without index), which forces him to refer to often to external info. If the contents would be ordered better I could give it 3 stars, but that doesnt compensate for other missing info that real professionals would require. Whats also sad is that I am not yet sure if the book is a victom of the 6 months publishers cycle or Kasperskys original writing style. So it stays at max a fun read for in between, but nothing that will last long in my shelfes, unfortunately currently there seems to be no better alternative on the marcet. It will depend strongly on the time and skill the reader invest into this book to get the most out of it. This is the first time that straight from my heart I cant really recommend a book to anybody. The best advice I can give for anybody interested in the book is to have a good look at it in a book-store close by to see if it really contains what you are after, to avoid disappointment. KASPERSKY - YOU CAN DO BETTER !! PS: If anybody wants my book, Its available for sale on amazon.co.jp.