Recover images from broken filesystem.

Tags : Linux, Software

Case

I was installing Raspbian on microSD card and put wrong card into my laptop. After flashing Raspbian on it I’ve found it was the card used by my parents compact camera. I thought all data was lost.

Searching for tool

Quite a few years ago I had my last attempt at recovering data from failing HDD disk, and I was using the most popular commercian windows tool (it was probably Ontrack)

I’m using exclusively GNU/Linux on laptop now so I cannot use windows tools so I need to do some research.

The best results I’ve got using foremost which search image for JPEG begin and end file signatures.

Process

First we need to copy data from device with broken filesystem. This is dangerous process if you mistake source with destination.

dd if=/dev/sdb of=sd.img bs=1MB

Next create directory where you want output JPEGs to be stored. I hope you don’t need to readt how to create directory mkdir output.

The last part, apart of checking output, is to run recovering tool.

foremost -t jpeg -i sd.img -o output/

• -t jpeg - it has predefined some types of files which can try to recover. I haven’t tried other types.
• -i sd.img - image of whole device copied using dd
• -o output/ - recovered files with report will be put there