I keep reading that Ma.gnolia’s data is permanently lost because “a specialist had been unable to recover any data from the corrupted hard drive.” This is not in itself a reason to consider data completely lost.
It is not clear to me whether the hard drive itself is unusable, e.g. the spindle won’t spin and the head won’t read the ones and zeroes, or whether the filesystem is corrupted. It sounds to me, from reading Larry Hallf’s comments, like it’s a simple matter of filesystem corruption. And even if the disk is dead, there is apparently a backup made from the corrupted filesystem, so there should be more than one way to …
[Read more]