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Re: [Xen-users] Storage recovery question / recommendations



Hi Errol and all :-)

Testdisk (photorec actually) was most helpful. I was able to recover a 10GB 
data partition I think. For some reason (maybe because it was allocated on 
hardware HBA?) the vhd seemed to be recovered whole...

But there is another VHD I need - and this one is harder. It contains a 24GB 
base part, and was expanded once or twice with a few more GB.

I'm not sure how that would work - on NFS when I allocate or increase a VHD it 
seems to be allocated as required, however when I've made these changes on the 
local storage the allocation seems to occur as needed (resulting in 
fragmentation). 

So... 
1) am I asking these follow ups in the right place or is this more appropriate 
for another list?
Assuming I'm ok here...

2) Is it likely the additional allocation will be in a single "chunk" - and 
will there likely be any way to identify it? I recovered the other VHD by 
adding a signature to photorec for VHD and searching the raw disk for the 
signature. But I think it only pulled up the first initial allocation - the 
part that was added on seems to be missing.

3) I have a problem with the partial vhd's...as a result of the missing pieces, 
xen, which seems to "validate" the VHD prior to starting the VM. They fail with 
"The attempt to load the VDI failed". If I could connect them anyways I might 
be able to scan the contents - looking for another way to do that...

I've got an active thread there as well on the testdisk site:

 http://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/post7921.html#p7921

Thank you for your time.

M
-----Original Message-----
From: Errol Neal [mailto:eneal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: April 16, 2013 8:10 AM
To: Mitch (Bitblock)
Cc: 'Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] Storage recovery question / recommendations

On Tue, 04/16/2013 11:01 AM, "mitch@xxxxxxxxxxxx" 
<mitch@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Presuming the files are recoverable, is there likely any way to recognize 
> them? I guess I will be searching for the virtual disk files themselves which 
> I could add as storage to the replacement virtual machine - on vmware I could 
> find files related to a vm under a folder often named for that vm - the 
> structure wasn't very deep...
> 
> Is the xen structure similar? I must be using the wrong keywords - but so far 
> I haven't seen at a command promt what or where xen vm files are stored and 
> what they look like so I'm not sure what to expect. 
> 

yes - that is what testdisk is for. it will scan the physical disk and look for 
recognizable signatures associated with filesystems. so long as you haven't 
overwritten or zero'd out any of the data blocks, id' expect that you'd be able 
to recover all of your data. 

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