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How can I retrieve my compromised personal information in Ubuntu Studio?

ng flag

I had a major system failure a few days ago and I'm desperately trying to retrieve my Hard Disk data without compromising the entire system. I've performed an fsck command on the /dev/sda2 partition but this will no longer work. I don't have access currently to my backups. I left my swap space in good standing but the computer's laptop, fan, and potentially the hard disk might be dead. Part of the critical failures involves the Plasma KDE environment because it's preventing me from executing navigator processes correctly. The keyboard is unresponsive. Finally, because the system lacks a battery it cannot be cut off from the electrical supply without a serious compromise in the internal memory. Oh and the cherry on top of this whole problem is that attempting to execute any process as root just sends me back to emergency mode even though I am the system administrator.

Anyways, if anyone is willing to help, this would be very much appreciated.

user535733 avatar
cn flag
Move the hard drive to a working system, make a bit-for-bit copy of the drive, and attempt to recover your data from the copy. Trying to recover data on faulty hardware is a waste of your time and effort, and might make things much worse. If the hard drive is truly dead, then you have entered the realm of professional data recovery services.
Organic Marble avatar
us flag
I've read this carefully, but the description of what the problem actually is, is unclear. Is the hard drive failed or not?
mchid avatar
bo flag
You want to stop using the system and only access the drive through a live USB session or transfer the harddrive to another computer where you can retrieve the data from there. There are answers [here](https://askubuntu.com/a/158970/167115) and [here](https://askubuntu.com/questions/19297/how-to-recover-data-from-a-failing-hard-drive) and [here](https://askubuntu.com/questions/819206/recover-data-from-a-failing-hard-drive) and I've had some success using photorec/testdisk to recover some data from a failed drive.
mchid avatar
bo flag
Keep in mind that testdisk/photorec should probably be a last option because it doesn't retrieve file names so you'll have to go through manually and inspect each file. It helps that you can sometimes specify which directory to recover from but it's still not ideal.
starseed_trooper avatar
ng flag
Thanks, everyone. As I see it, part of the current difficulty with the live USB session is configuring the fiber optic connection to get internet access. For some reason, the system has to be physically connected to WLAN in order to get internet access. Connection over Wi-FI is at the time not possible.
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