On 11/21/25 10:13 AM, home user via users wrote:
(F-42 Workstation; gnome)
This past spring, I backed-up some 15-20 GB to an MDISC blu-ray. Now I
need to recover that data.
The optical device is blu-ray. It (supposedly) handles MDISC. It
connects to the desktop via 2 USB ports.
- I tried recovering the data logged in as a regular user, as the admin,
and as root.
- I tried the file browser, Brasero, Gnome CD Master, and K3b. They
either don't see the device, or they see it but don't know there's a
disc in it. Gnome CD Master shows the device's status as "Busy".
- I tried plugging in the device after logging in; I tried plugging it
in before powering up the desktop.
Nothing works.
The "Disks" utility does see the optical drive.
I get no real error messages.
I spent time in the "mount" man page, but could not make sense of it.
I've spent hours on this. How do I recover the back-ups from the blu-
ray disc?
I appreciate everyone's posts so far. I've not been replying because
I've been swamped recently trying to get yahoo e-mail working in
Thunderbird on the new desktop, and with a lot of non-computer work.
By far, my priority in this thread is recovering what's on the back-up
blu-ray that I made on the old desktop in early April. As I reported in
an earlier post, one blu-ray drive on the old desktop was able to read
an older blu-ray back-up, so I thought I'd try reading the April back-up
in that drive. I'm not an IT professional. I examined the dd man page,
and found it too much for me. But I had some notes from a successful
use of ddrescue on a bad USB stick this past June. So, on the old
desktop, I tried ddrescue on the April back-up. It took several tries,
but it finally worked...
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
root:~# ddrescue -f -n /dev/sr0 bluray.img ddrescue1124.log
GNU ddrescue 1.28
Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
ipos: 24756 MB, non-trimmed: 0 B, current rate: 48562 kB/s
opos: 24756 MB, non-scraped: 0 B, average rate: 34967 kB/s
non-tried: 0 B, bad-sector: 0 B, error rate: 0 B/s
rescued: 24756 MB, bad areas: 0, run time: 11m 48s
pct rescued: 100.00%, read errors: 0, remaining time: n/a
time since last successful read: 0s
Copying non-tried blocks... Pass 1 (forwards)
Finished
root:~# cat ddrescue1124.log
# Mapfile. Created by GNU ddrescue version 1.28
# Command line: ddrescue -f -n /dev/sr0 bluray.img ddrescue1124.log
# Start time: 2025-11-24 15:03:13
# Current time: 2025-11-24 15:15:01
# Finished
# current_pos current_status current_pass
0x5C39F0000 + 1
# pos size status
0x00000000 0x5C3A00000 +
root:~#
[snip]
root:~# ls -l bluray.img
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 24756879360 Nov 24 15:15 bluray.img
root:~#
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The non-zero data starts at hexadecimal address 8000 and ends at
hexadecimal address 191A43E4B. So about 6.7 GB of actual data was
recovered. The underside of the disc showed that the inner 1.15 - 2 cm
(approximately) had been written by the April back-up.
In early June, I had to get off-line help to complete recovery of a
back-up from a bad USB stick. I don't know how he did it, but I gather
it was quick and easy. When it was done, he made a compressed ISO file
available to me to download.
The IMG file produced by the ddrescue is on the old desktop (F-42
Workstation). Using a hex editor, I'm able to recognize directory
names, file names, and strings from text files in the IMG file. How do
I finish this recovery? Again, I'm not an IT professional. I need
complete step-by-step instructions. While I await that, I'll be trying
(again!) to get yahoo e-mail working in Thunderbird.
--
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