On 02/03/15 17:05, Mark Rogers wrote:
I have a disk image taken around ten years ago. It has a .dsk file extension, which might be a clue to what I used to take the image but more likely is something I picked because it was a disk!
I'm trying to recover data from it but none of my normal tools are recognising it. Eg: $ file myfile.dsk myfile.dks: data $ fdisk -l myfile.dsk Disk myfile.dsk: 39.7 GB, 39711651840 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4828 cylinders, total 77561820 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Disk myfile.dsk doesn't contain a valid partition table
Testdisk isn't giving me any clear results (it can find an ext3 partition but doesn't seem then able to extract anything from it).
I'm pretty sure this was a straight image from a physical disk (it could have been a virtual disk but it's 39GB so I doubt that). It's quite possible that the default geometry settings in tesdisk etc are wrong but short of random guesses I don't know what to try.
I am confident my data is there; if I view the raw data I am able to find a lot of it (mostly scripts which are therefore in plain text). Not that this is a very easy way to extract data!
Suggestions as to what I should do to recover data?
If it helps, the first 4096 bytes are all zero (so there's no obvious file header).
Mark
Looking at the .dsk file extension, there are several Windows and Mac programs that use them. This http://www.file-extensions.org/dsk-file-extension-vmware-virtual-disk-file says "The DSK file extension was used by earlier versions of VMware products files that contain saved virtual disks. The latest versions of VMware are using the VMDK file extension instead."
Were you using VMWare back then then? If so, see if you can mount it or update it to the latest version then mount it.
Steve