SD card data recovery?

[Epedemic]

So my SD card crashed this night...

I got at notification at 1 am, and at 8 am the pi was dead... power cycle only resulted in a flashing "dos prompt" like indicator on my monitor...

However i installed xbian to a new sd card which boots well, so the pi is alright. However i would like to get my old installation back, as i had tons of stuff configured, sickbeard, nzbget, gotham and so on... The old SD card is readable on my windows PC (at least the 33mb partition containing boot(?) stuff).

Anyone know how to restore the old SD card, or copy its contents to the new one? (Or another working one)

[Fred]

Use a ubuntu live cd. Ubuntu will recognize the second partition. If its not too messed up you might be able to recover some data.

[Epedemic]

Thanks, but the card has died completely, so unfortunately i cannot try it out :/

[Isabel]

Actually you can recover your data files and other things if you formatted you sd card if it cracks or dead you can't recover anything.

[IriDium]

It would seem that the SD card is dead.

Even if you could recover "some" of the data the dependencies may not be met.

It's best to bite the bullet and remember the old saying "backup backup backup".

Soft backups can be made with xbmc-backup within xbmc, even scheduled to an external source.

Hard backups can be made by removing the SD card and using a windoze disk imaging software like http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/ which will read the disk and make a backup image for you.

Remember SD cards are not as robust as HDD especially if they are removed often - the plastic separators will break causing a short.

You could also DD your SD cards image via ssh to eliminate the need to remove the SD card.

sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0p2 of=/dev/xxxx bs=512 where xxxx is your backup drive.

[BartOtten]

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[f1vefour]

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[Kolpoiu]

There are lots of card data recovery tools, you can google it or searth it on soft download web:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/vibosoftcarddatarecovery/?source=directory

[Fabio72]

testdisk
testdisk is a good data recovery tool, but the problem is btrfs. I don't know if exists a tool than can cope with btrfs

[IriDium]

I'm not sure if it's related but I've noticed using gparted on XBian SD cards that it throws up a warning about overlapping partitions. It maybe a btrfs thing.