On 03/03/15 11:03, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 3 March 2015 at 10:10, Mark Rogers mark@more-solutions.co.uk wrote:
Thanks for the tip, I'll see whether that gets me in!
Sadly this got me nowhere so far, but I am not convinced this isn't the right track.
I've tried (and failed) to find a way to determine whether this is indeed a VMWare .dsk file. VirtualBox won't allow me to use it as is (unsupported file). I was able to use "vboxmanage convertfromraw" to "convert" to a vdi file, but the resulting file wasn't valid and I'm pretty sure that treating the .dsk as a raw file is no different from trying to mount it directly in Linux.
Some references I have found suggest that .dsk is indeed just a raw disk image (in which case I am no further forward!).
It is possible that the image is corrupt (eg it might have been taken from a damaged disk); if so I need to find ways to try to repair the filesystem as much as is possible (I need very little off the old disk). What steps would I take to try to locate an ext* filesystem and repair it? It's reasonable to assume that it would have been a fairly typical Linux installation as I didn't know enough back then to have done much else. I think I was using Red Hat back then and a quick grep of the image suggests it was RH7.
Just clutching at straws here, but could you DD it onto an empty Hard disk, then see if any disk tools can "fix" the disk and consequently recover the data?
I suppose a pertinant question would be, what do you actually want from this file anyway? Because, if you just need some JPGs for instance, there are JPG recovery tools. My point is there may be specific tools for specific files.
Steve