Data recovery from a corrupt hard disk
Earlier this week, I was transferring all my important data from my external 120GB USB hard disk to my new laptop. During the process, the transfer became unbearably slow. I decided to cancel it and reboot my computer to get a fresh start.
To my dismay, Windows Vista detects the hard drive but is unable to read it prompting me to format the drive. After a bit of reading, and trying to access the drive in different ways - I got the following error message.
Disk is unaccessible.
The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.
It was impossible for me to let go of all my data and thus, I started looking into ways to recover it.
During the process, I realized that the format of my drive had changed from NTFS to RAW - which was rather strange. Searching through Google on Data Recovery Software, I stumbled upon a neat software called R-Studio. I downloaded its trial version to give it a try.
It took approximately 7 hours for it to scan through my corrupt hard drive - after which I could view all my folder structure & files in the hard drive. You can only preview data or recover upto 64 Kb in the demo version of R-Studio. I tested its recover data tool and was very impressed to see that it managed to recover my data.
I purchased the full version of the software for a worthy price of USD 79.99 - got the license key immediately after making payment and started off recovering my data.
Thanks to R-Studio, I have recovered most of my data - besides some that resided on bad clusters.
How do I restore a MySQL dump?
If you have an all-database MySQL dump, follow the instructions below to restore your SQL file with all database data & privileges.
Please note that the following procedures require command line access and is assuming you are the administrator of the computer.
Step 1:
Open up command line.
Start > Run > Type 'cmd' > Enter
Step 2:
Change directory to your MySQL bin folder. This can be C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL 4.1 Server\bin -- or C:\xampp\mysql\bin depending on what your setup is like. You can do so by the 'cd' command as follows:
cd C:\xampp\mysql\bin
Step 3:
Ensure that you have moved your backup file (eg: db_backup.sql) into the bin folder and run the following command where test is an empty MySQL database.
mysql -u root -p test < db_backup.sql
It will prompt you for your root password. Enter that and it will start importing your SQL file. It can take several minutes depending on how big your SQL file is.
Good luck!
How to backup MySQL server?
Recently, I bought a new laptop and was challenged to move my development sites over. Copying files and sites is all pretty easy, however, if you do not backup your MySQL server correctly - you will face quite a hassle recreating all the databases and privileges.
I came across the following way that was pretty easy to move around 150 databases with their privileges swiftly.
Please note that the following procedures require command line access and is assuming you are the administrator of the computer.
Step 1:
Open up command line.
Start > Run > Type 'cmd' > Enter
Step 2:
Change directory to your MySQL bin folder. This can be C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL 4.1 Server\bin -- or C:\xampp\mysql\bin depending on what your setup is like. You can do so by the 'cd' command as follows:
cd C:\xampp\mysql\bin
Step 3:
Type in the following command to dump all databases into an sql file.
mysqldump --all-databases > db_backup.sql
This can take several minutes depending on the size of your databases. Once done, check your bin folder for db_backup.sql file which contains SQL queries of your entire MySQL server.
You may want to see my other post regarding restoring MySQL server.
Welcome to Mohsin Sumar’s blog
It's been a while, couple of years actually, since I updated my website. For those who do not know me, please see my biography page for more information about me. I have had my personal blog on my to-do list for quite sometime and finally, here it is.
It's good to be back. Just to let you know that I will be updating my blog with personal experiences, advises, tips & tricks and more on a variety of topics including but not limited to web development, PHP, MySQL and Apache.
I will also put up my tutorial and download files that I had posted up on Flash-dB where I was a moderator for a long time. My tutorial, in particular, GuestBook Tutorial was released freely and available at http://www.flash-db.com/Tutorials/guestbook/.
You can get in touch with me if you like assistance, however, due to time & busy life we all lead, I may not be able to attend all queries.
Till then,
Mohsin.
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