Comments on: Recover Data From a dead hard drive using ddrescue

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:08:19 +0000

To the person who say they are still at a loss because the 10% of the drive that was bad was the partition sectors and so the resulting image was useless:

I had a similar experience with a OSX (HSF+) formatted drive and was able to recover 100% of my lost data by using a combination of DiskWarrior and photorec. DiskWarrior is OSX software that searches through a damaged disk and tries to recover the disk’s file structure even in the complete absence of the index files.

Photorec may be even more useful for your purposes. It is completely agnostic about what file system the damaged image is supposed to be in and operates under the assumption that most file systems try to allocate blocks of data consecutively (which they do). It simply searches the raw data for headers that signify the beginning of common file types. It can recover just about any photo/image format, text files, Office files, etc. The only downside is that it can’t necessarily assign the proper name to the file, so you end up having to browse through a lot of junk when it’s done to find the files you want.

In my case, I was able to recover 99% of my data using DiskWarrior, but there was one Word file that was really important and it wasn’t recovered. I used photorec to recover all of the word files it could find, then I used an indexer (OSX’s built in spotlight) and searched for the keywords in the document. I found it (as well as all previous saves of the file).

By: SS

SS — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:14:31 +0000

one day i Shut Down my computer and next day, when i started it, it didn’t start and showed a message like “cant boot,insert the boot disk” then i plugged the HDD in to another Computer, where same message showed. then i was sure that its gone, but i dunno what happened to it, what can i do now to recover data from it???

quick reply can help me. thanks.

By: sam

sam — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:02:15 +0000

just wanted to say thank you the ddrescue + mounting image directions allowed me to save a friend’s mydocuments folder after a hd crash

By: HtW

HtW — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:14:11 +0000

Basically I want to say to those having dropped their harddisks, cant get the disk to start up, etc. You are out of luck. You can take it to a professional forensic recovery company, they can open it up in a dust-free vacuum chamber and transfer your platters to a platter reader. This will probably cost you thousands upon thousands of dollars. So if you are losing those all-important documents/music/emails/baby pictures/OTHER, consider it lost and start fresh. Sometimes it feels good to have a clean slate.

By: mikeal

mikeal — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:32:43 +0000

please i need help.i usually put my laptop hard drive in an external hard drive enclosure box couse i use it at work unfortunately i dropped it an now its not working even on the external device please can u tell me how to recover the data from at

By: Darren Whanger

Darren Whanger — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 06:34:59 +0000

Hi,
Any suggestions on what to use if Linux tries but is not able to make the drive available as a device? I am looking at the system log under Suse Linux and it reports that it found the drive, but could not set the drive up under /dev/sdd. It reports “Unit not ready”, “Sense Key: Aborted Command [current]“….there is more.

Any suggestions to get it recognized as a device so I can run dd_rescue?

Thanks,
Darren

By: Direc

Direc — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:56:36 +0000

Oh! Jack, you are absolutely right in comment #16. And still they have not been corrected!

By: Direc

Direc — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:53:41 +0000

I’m using Ubuntu 9.04 ATM, and I noticed that ddrescue is in a package baller gddrescue. I wish it was included in livd CD… (now I have to edit apt sources, update and install it)

By: Vikram

Vikram — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:32:51 +0000

Hi, I have a Sata Intrnal hard drive and it is not detecting in any system.. i also tried by changing the jumper settings, nut its not wrkin.. hw can i retrieve Data frm tat hard Disk Completely.

Ps Help.

By: Hopi

Hopi — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:46:16 +0000

Hi,
It appears that folks are not considering simple loose wires etc.. viz… hardware issues.
If the drive is not physically operable in the computer it is in, a good solution is to take it out, put it in an external case with a USB connection and see if it can be “viewed” from a different Linux computer. Occasionally hardware problems may exist between the drive and the rest of the contraption and all such failures qualify as a “hard drive had crashed !” Cases for hardware can be had for as little as US$10 or even cheaper.
good luck
Hopi

By: John

John — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 15:00:30 +0000

There’s a nice livecd out there for recovering bad hard disks:
http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/

BTW nobody responded to comment #16 which I thought brought up some relevant mistakes, unless I am misunderstanding too.

By: woody64

woody64 — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:15:26 +0000

I have a dead sata harddrive, that is it runs but for some reason it wouldn’t reload windows or recover my info.Anyway i put a new one in my laptop and was wondering is there anyway to get some info from that drive.

By: Aman

Aman — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:33:08 +0000

Hello Friends,

Please Help me…. i am having a laptop and my laptop hard drive is not working. my hard drive is crashed. can anyone help me and tell me how can i recover data from my crashed hard drive to working hard drive..

Thanks
Aman

By: Sanjoy

Sanjoy — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:58:31 +0000

this is excellent.

By: Umarzuki

Umarzuki — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 06:56:17 +0000

@rido and festus

did you guys read the article and the comments?

By: festus femi

festus femi — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:48:37 +0000

i need tutorials on how to recover data from hard drive,os

By: Isaac

Isaac — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 10:48:25 +0000

dead harddrive I want all the technical way to let
it function well.
harddrive can’t boot from the board. cant i do adjustmant on the circut board to let it function well on the jumper
2. power led board work but the cable can’t work what to do.

By: rido

rido — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 03:59:22 +0000

dear,

i have a hard drive WD 3GB, but it doesn’t work and not found on system, there is message error
while bios trying to detected the hard drive. i have some data that’s so important for me, and
i want it backed. would somebody want to help me? please….!

By: Brian S

Brian S — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:38:10 +0000

Thanks to all for helping; I have a Toshiba drive 40 GB (OEM from an IBM laptop) that went bad on me.

I have some data that I would like to recover from the drive. I have a machine running SUSE Linux 10.1, and inserted the drive in an external 2.5″ enclosure. I installed dd_rescue on the Linux box.

When I run dmesg, I get a lot of I/O Errors with bad logical blocks 1 through 7, and an error message that it is unable to read the partition table.

There are also a lot of bad sectors (too many to list).

When I run: # dd_rescue /dev/sdb /root/backup.img …. dd_rescue runs and seems to give errors for each sector read - no data is recovered, the backup.img is 0 bytes.

I get the same if I run dd_rescue in reverse direction (-r) switch. I let dd_rescue run for about 5 minutes each time, and I ctrl+c to exit as I’m fearful of enacting more damage to the drive.

I have tried these commands with another drive, and the process works, so I’m sure it’s the drive, and not the syntax or the external enclosure.

Any suggestions or tips? Should I send the drive to a professional recovery? They are asking about 1100 to recover data… ooof!

Thanks to any that help!
Brian

By: chris beach

chris beach — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 03:06:40 +0000

PC trys to log on but states internal disk drive not found; HDD hard error. Then strike F1 to reboot, nothing.
Can someone please let me know what this means, I’m stationed in Afghanistan right know and I’m in need of my laptop right now??