On 3 March 2015 at 11:17, Thomas Pircher tehpeh-alug@tty1.net wrote:
You may try "qemu-img info FILE". With a bit of luck you might get some more information about the format of the file, if it is indeed a VM format.
Thanks, that's the sort of command I needed.
Unfortunately it just says "file format: raw", which I take to be another way of saying it's not a recognisable format.
My current best guess is that I have a disk image from a real disk with chunks missing, including the first 4096 bytes which have all been zeroed. The data that is there is probably good, however.
Given that the first 4096 bytes probably included all sorts of useful meta data about the rest of the disk this could be a problem but how best to proceed?
To Steve: What I'm looking to recover is the "source" of an old website, so PHP/HTML (aka text) files, a few images, etc, and a MySQL database. I considered seeing what (eg) photorec or scalpel would give me, but under the circumstances it'll be more noise than signal.
Plus: It's a challenge, and I'd like to find a way. The files aren't all that critical (I'm trying to recover them as a favour to someone), but I find it's times like this that I learn lots about filesystem recovery that turns out to be useful later on.