Recover Data From a dead hard drive using ddrescue

Like dd, dd_rescue does copy data from one file or block device to another.dd_rescue is a tool to help you to save data from crashed partition. It tries to read and if it fails, it will go on with the next sectors where tools like dd will fail. If the copying process is interrupted by the user it is possible to continue at any position later. It can copy backwards.


dd_rescue Advantages

Imagine, one of your partitions is crashed, and as there are some hard errors, you don’t want to write to this hard disk any more. Just getting all the data off it and retiring it seems to be suitable. However, you can’t access the files, as the file system is damaged.

Now, you want to copy the whole partition into a file. You burn it on CD-Rom, just to never lose it again. You can setup a loop device, and repair (fsck) it and hopefully are able to mount it.

Copying this partition with normal Un*x tools like cat or dd will fail, as those tools abort on error. dd_rescue instead will try to read and if it fails, it will go on with the next sectors. The output file naturally will have holes in it, of course. You can write a log file, to see, where all these errors are located.

The data rate drops very low, when errors are encountered. If you interrupt the process of copying, you don’t lose anything. You can just continue at any position later. The output file will just be filled in further and not truncated as with other Un*x tools.

If you have one spot of bad sectors within the partition, it might be a good idea, to approach this spot from both sides. Reverse direction copy is your friend.

The two block sizes are a performance optimization. Large block sizes result in superior performance, but in case of errors, you want to try to salvage every single sector. So hardbs is best be set to the hardware sector size (most often 512 bytes) and softbs to a large value, such as the default 16k.

Install dd_rescue in Debian

Install ddrescue using the following command

#apt-get install ddrescue

Install ddrescue in Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install ddrescue

This will complete the installation

ddrescue Syntax

dd_rescue [options] infile outfile

Now we will see how to use ddrescue under damaged disk

If you have a damaged hard disk /dev/sda1 and you have an empty space hard disk /dev/sda2 Now if you want to copy data from /dev/sda1 to /dev/sda2 use the following commnd

# dd_rescue /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2/backup.img

If you are using ubuntu linux use the following command

sudo dd_rescue /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2/backup.img

This copies an image of /dev/sda1 to sda2

Now you need to check the backup image consistency this will check for is there any problems with this image.

#fsck -y /dev/sda2/backup.img

If you are using ubuntu linux use the following command

sudo fsck -y /dev/sda2/backup.img

After finishing this checking you need to mount your disk image in to your other hard disk

#mount /dev/sda2/backup.img /mnt/recoverydata

If you are using ubuntu linux use the following command

sudo mount /dev/sda2/backup.img /mnt/recoverydata

This will mount all the data from the backup.img under /mnt/recoverydata now you can try to access the data it should work without any problem.

Restore image

If you want to restore this image use the following command

#dd_rescue /dev/sda2/backup.img /dev/sda1

If you are using ubuntu linux use the following command

sudo dd_rescue /dev/sda2/backup.img /dev/sda1

Copy Disk Image to remote machine using SSH

If you want to copy your disk image to remote machine over ssh you need to use the following command

#dd_rescue /dev/sda1 – | ssh username@machineip ‘cat /datarecovery/backup.img’

If you are using ubuntu linux use the following command

sudo dd_rescue /dev/sda1 – | ssh username@machineip ‘cat /datarecovery/backup.img’

This will be prompetd for password of the username you have menctioned in the above command after entering the password dd_rescue strats copying obviously it will take some time to copy over the network.

Possible Error

If you see the following error at the time of copying you can ignore this error

dd_rescue: (warning): output file is not seekable!
dd_rescue: (warning): Illegal seek

If you want to take this image in compressed format you can use the following command format

#tar zcvf – /dev/sda1 | ssh username@machineip ‘cat@@>/tmp /datarecovery/backup.tar.gz’

If you are using ubuntu linux use the following command

sudo tar zcvf – /dev/sda1 | ssh username@machineip ‘cat@@>/tmp /datarecovery/backup.tar.gz’

If you want to know more available options check dd_rescue man page

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61 thoughts on “Recover Data From a dead hard drive using ddrescue

  1. Actually, dd can do most of what you claim dd_rescue to do with the proper options.

    The only feature dd_rescue offers that dd does not is reverse copying, which is kind of moot anyway if either can keep copying while being error tolerant.

  2. reverse copy is good because some drives will take days/weeks to copy if you let dd go on thru with conv=noerror,sync because it will try each block and the drive could take 30 seconds to fail a bad sector sometimes. if there is just a terrible band somewhere on the drive which is often then you can copy once normally until it starts going terribly slow and once in reverse until it does again and then you have 90% of the drive with a band missing in the middle and sometimes that is still a useful win depending on the situation and considering the other 10% could take days to get and would be swiss cheese anyways

  3. Hi guys, i need to recover some valuable data and
    family pics from a drive that has gone south. It
    was a master on another machine. I changed it(with
    jumpers) to a slave so I could access it from
    our main puter. When I can see finally see it in
    “My Computer”, it gives me a “drive needs formatting”
    message. I downloaded DDRESCUE but have no idea
    how to use it. It is, I’m sure, way beyond my
    technical prowess. I cannot even understand the
    instructions provided. Am I in way over my head?

    thanks, neo

  4. Neo, you may be over your head, but if you can read, you can do it. Get yourself a new drive. Install the new drive and set to master, set the old drive to slave. Have someone get you a copy of Ubuntu or Kubuntu (which I prefer). Install it to your new drive. Leave yourself some space, meaning partition your drive, leaving some space to restore your files. The new drive will probably be 200-250 GB. Leave enough room at beginning of the drive to reinstall Windows if you want, like 20GB or so, then make a 1GB swap partition for Linux, then a “/” or root partition of 10-20GB, then make the rest of the drive “/home” or part of it “/home” and room for another NTFS data partition. Decide this scheme ahead of time.

    If you want to recover the old drive to CD, then you need a burner before you start, but you will have enough space on your tasty new drive. After you get Linux installed, then you can open a terminal window and run the commands above.
    If you can install Linux, then you can do this. If you can’t, then go find your nearest Linux User Group and ask for help. If you are of the mindset that you only use Windows, then good luck finding help. I charge $75/hour for this kind of headache, others charge way more. It gets less and less attractive to work on Windows on the side. If you aren’t willing to learn a bit to solve your problem, then your pictures, etc. must not be that important to you.

  5. Actually, there are two programs with similar names, ‘dd_rescue’ and ‘ddrescue’ (my preference)……The difference is ‘ddrescue’ is also known as gnu ddrescue, which can automate the whole process by specifying the log file option, and can resume where it left off if interrupted…….dd_rescue requires a separate wrapper script to automate it…

    So you should make sure to use the correct name throughout the entire article, and not interchange dd_rescue with ddrescue…. 🙂

  6. A guy calls himself Neo and he doesn’t know the difference between Windows and Linux software? 😉

  7. Just one small typo, I noticed.

    Under the Install for Ubuntu, you have:
    sudo apt-get install ddrescure
    but it should be
    sudo apt-get install ddrescue

    not, a big deal, but I did a copy/paste and could not find the package at first.

  8. I am surprised you didn’t write about dd_rhelp. dd_rhelp is a wrapper script that makes dd_rescue go back over bad sections, and try to recover data over and over again. By running dd_rescue with dd_rhelp for about three weeks, I was able to recover over 90% of the data on a malfunctioning drive. Without dd_rhelp, I probably would have recovered less than 10% on this particular drive. thegeekster wrote that there are two separate programs with similar names. I am definitely referring to the one with the underscore in the name. What is the difference?

  9. ddrescue is wonderful tool, I rescued data from several disks with its help. But I met a situation several weeks ago when ddrescue failed. Well, ddrescue did good job but result was useless. 20GB disk with 10GB Linux partition was damaged at the place where Linux partition started. I recovered almost everything, only about 100MB (I don’t remember exact number) of disk sectors were unreadable. As the beginning of Linux partition was demaged, I was unable to get data from rescued disk, I was unable to mount rescued partition… 🙁 Is there a tool do this job? To recover Linux partition (probably ext2) when partition start is missing?

  10. Rakesh,

    Here’s a better link:
    http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=ddrescue
    (That link finds both ddrescue and dd_rescue.)

    The program described in this article is Garloff’s original dd_rescue.

    The program which I very much prefer is Diaz’s newer GNU ddrescue.

    Both are mature, well-respected tools. However, Diaz’s ddrescue maintains a logfile so that it always knows what has been recovered, and what has not. So if you stop it (or your computer crashes) in the middle of a recovery operation, you can just run it again and it’ll pick up where it left off.

    Also, you can try again with different options (e.g., after disabling readahead or dma on the drive, or reading smaller chunks), or you can retry while reading from a raw device bound to the /dev/hdx instead of to the drive itself, to read individual sectors. It just works: if you put the drive in the freezer overnight, then hook it up and re-run GNU ddrescue with “-r 1” (retry bad sectors 1 time), it’ll only try to read the unrecovered sectors, and won’t waste time re-reading the parts that have already been recovered.

    What’s more, the logfile is plain ASCII and well-documented, so it serves as a record that you can use for other purposes. E.g., I’ve written a Perl script which reads the ddrescue logfile and spits out a Windows .bat file of ‘nfi’ commands, to determine which files on an NTFS file system are damaged.

    -Dave Burton

  11. Hi guys, I need to recover some valuable data.
    My hard drive crashed. It doesn’t spin and gives
    the error ” Primary hard disk drive 0 not found,
    No bootable device-Strike F1 to retry boot,
    F2 for setup utility. Please, any help.. Thanks

  12. Like Dave Burton says above, ddrescue is actually equivalent to dd_rescue+dd_rhelp+some more. Have a look here under the heading “Disk drive recovery: ddrescue, dd_rescue, dd_rhelp” for a synopsis.

  13. Can somebody please clarify me the first section of the example? My questions:

    1. I think /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 are two partitions of the same hard disk. If you want to save a backup of the crashed sda1, you shouldn’t place it onto the same physical disk.

    2. /dev/sda2 is a device file, so the “/dev/sda2/backup.img” reference is invalid. You should mount the partition first, and then – if it has a writeable filesystem on it – you can create the backup file (the next example assumes that neither sda1 nor sda2 is mounted):
    # mkdir /root/rescue
    # mount /dev/sda2 /root/rescue
    # dd_rescue /dev/sda1 /root/rescue/backup.img

    3. I think when you try to mount a regular file as a partition you can only do it through a kernel loop device. It goes like this:
    # mount -o loop /root/rescue/backup.img

    Sorry if I misunderstood it all. 🙂

  14. Hi,
    Can anyone please tell me whether we can retrieve data from a hard disk after
    formatting the hard disk

  15. 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??

  16. Hi

    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

  17. 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….!

  18. 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.

  19. 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

  20. 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.

  21. 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

  22. 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.

  23. 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)

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

  25. 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

  26. 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

  27. 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.

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

  29. 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.

  30. 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).

  31. i have a problem that i have 40 gb hard drive and have 4 partitioned drives like drive C: drive D: Drive: E and Drive F: the problem is in F drive; whenever i want to open. i click on it and after some minutes tht error comes up like do you want to format or not…. i have very old data in this Drive. but when i reboot it in MS-Dos. the drive open with this command “f:” and enter and it shows all the files as well.. i want to copy the whole data from this drive to another drive than i will format it.. i dont want to loss the data thats why problem occurs… kindly reply me with solution… thank you very much for this favour… take care with this hope that you will reply me..on my mail id.. [email protected]

  32. My hard drive crashed weeks ago and i lost some data.I did not lose all the data because i have some of them backed up with an online backup system called safecopy online backup.Well on the other hand i would like to retrieve back the lost data.I love safecopy online backup because with them,they store deleted files forever.

  33. Comments are rotten place to try to conduct a conversation, but I might as well dump my experience here. I was trying to get an old PC going, and the failed install of Win XP (I know, I know) evidently trashed the file table. The drive looks like all the space is unallocated.

    As noted, the instructions above don’t work, but I was able to use the command to make a backup.img in a directory. I tried to mount it with mount -t ext3 -o loop /mnt/pics/backup.img /mnt/rescue, but got this error: EXT3-fs (loop0): error: can’t find ext3 filesystem on dev loop0.

  34. Every arsing one of these utilities I’ve tried (whether it be in DOS, Linux, LiveCD, Windows, PE whatever) have to feck around and try to read shyte they don’t need off the HD and cause it to hang until I reboot. Pretty much useless.

  35. Dear Sir

    I have one hard disk of Hitachi company which is used in a laptop of sony company.
    But my hard disk is dead and controller not working.
    Is there is any solution to recover the data from there

    Manish
    K.P.S.
    Warora chandrapur
    9158479448

  36. Hello,

    While trying to install gddrescue on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx on a machine that does not have internet connection on it, i copied the ddrescue-1.13.tar file from another machine on to the Home folder. but running the sudo aptitude install ddrescue command gives me a “could not find any package whose name or description matched “ddrescue”‘. can anyone help me?

    Thank a bunch

  37. I’m on Ubuntu 10.04, and the package is called “gddrescue” in Synaptic Package Manager. However, once it is installed, the command seems to be (confusingly) “ddrescue”.

  38. Hello,
    i dropped my laptop (hp dv7 ‘windows 7’) maybe a few inches onto a piece of wood. after that my laptop started to be really really slow. So i restarted it and then it would freeze on the starting windows page.
    So i decided to start it in safe mode, and then the screen was filled with scripts.
    Now when i start it all that it says is: “A disc read occurred / Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart”
    I ran a hard disc test and it ended saying “Hard Disc Test Fail”
    What should I do? i’m pretty sure my files are screwed but how can i recover them? How much would it cost?
    please help,
    Al

  39. PK: I had the same problem. But with SystemRescueCD and booting with “skipmount=/dev/sda2” as option in the startup I was able to have it NOT touch the drive.

    From thereon testdisk were able to fetch quite a lot of files from the disk. Mounting hung/froze everything so I couldn’t use any tools on the disk, and all systems tried mounting before. Good to get rid of it.

    Article writer: BTW, I find it very strange that you save the image to /dev/sda2/backup.img — i mean, you can’t save a file on a block device. I guess you mean /mnt/sda2/backup.img all those places…

  40. Can anyone give me the full command for reverse recovery?
    I am using ubuntu.
    Thank you!

  41. so I have a damaged drive in an external enclosure and I have a Knoppix LiveCD. Both my damaged drive and my good drive have windows vista installed. So my question is if I copy the covered data to my good drive will it mess up windows?

  42. Hi, I am using a LiveCD, since the partition that doesn’t work is the one that has Ubuntu. When I try to install it says that it can’t find the “pack” (dunno the word in english, in spanish it’s paquete :P), is there any way I can get it on a LiveCD, or do you know any other tool to do this when using a Live CD?? thanks very much

  43. Looking for advice. I have a 1T seagate that was installed in an ANAS350 SAN drive. After about a year, the thing went south. Now when I fire it up, I can read from it for a few seconds, and then It seems to die. If I leave it for a few tens of minutes, it starts to click. If I shutdown, the exact same thing happens, suggesting it’s not a thermal problem.

    So I fire up ddrescue and it can read a few hundred sectors and then a continuous string of end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector XXXXXXXX.

    What is happening? I thought I had a logical problem, but it might be more. Am I correct in assuming that i’m doing no writes with ddrescue?

    Thanks!

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