(Solved) Hard Drive Recovery Program

[Yankee]

There's a fellow up here at the local northern Illinois Linux User's Group
with a 2 TB hard drive.   Well portions of the drive have crashed.   The
core utilities haven't worked.   What should be recommended as a first
choice to recover some damaged data from this hard drive ?

If one more recovery program was tried I wonder what it would be.
Anyone with experience or ideas in this area ?

Thanks for your response.

[Just17]

photorec to recover files ......  but be sure to have sufficient space for EVERYTHING that has not been securely wiped from the drive.

When you say core utilities .....  is that some utility which will securely wipe the drive?  If so there would be nothing left to recover.

The description of the fault ....  and particularly what was done to it afterwards ....  is too vague to do anything but guess.

The first thing that should have been done was to mirror the drive to another HDD, and recover attemoted from there.

It could still be done but it may be too late for a lot of the data.

So the apps ....

testdisk
photorec
dd
ddrescue

regards.

[T6]

+1 for photorec, the problem with it is that it won't save well videos and the names of the files, forget them

there is a option, a app called getdataback, it is not free  but is really good with damaged hard disks http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

the tools you use depends on what type of damage it has, if it is a logic error on the partition, damages in the surface of the hard disk, damages in the mechanic parts or damages in the hard dis controller card

the last two usually means that you don't have much to do, if something needs to be recovered by any cost, a company recovering the files should be used, th cost is high most times

the first two sometimes can be fixed with chkdsk or any other tool that bypasses the file structure

note that you didn't told us what type of partition it has so we are guessing it is a hard disk with ntfs, please be more specific for a more precise answer

[kernowyon]

+1 for photorec
I have recovered data many times with that app - it is very good.

[Yankee]

photorec to recover files ......  but be sure to have sufficient space for EVERYTHING that has not been securely wiped from the drive.

When you say core utilities .....  is that some utility which will securely wipe the drive?  If so there would be nothing left to recover.

The description of the fault ....  and particularly what was done to it afterwards ....  is too vague to do anything but guess.

The first thing that should have been done was to mirror the drive to another HDD, and recover attemoted from there.

It could still be done but it may be too late for a lot of the data.

So the apps ....

testdisk
photorec
dd
ddrescue

regards.

By core utilities I mean things like cp and dd.
I've linked our message to their LUG.  Perhaps
one of our Synaptic apps will help.

Thanks for your response.

[Yankee]

I've told Andrew to reply to this link from the northern IL LUG.

Everything in that drive is EXT4  BTW.

[LSeraphim]

+1 for getdataback.
It has proven to be just phenomonal for recovering data off of every file system type I've ever tried.
More often than you'd imagine, a few minutes in the fridge does wonders for failing HDDs.
I actually keep a 20 gig quantum fireball with GDB, win2k and DSL(will upgrade to PCLOS next time I need it.)

[djohnston]

+1 for photorec and ddrescue. Also try dd_rescue. It has more fault tolerance than the other. All the packages are in the repositories.

If money is no object, here's another possible commercial solution. He can download the software for trial. It will allow him to preview what files can be recovered, but the trial version won't actually recover any data.

[Just17]

photorec to recover files ......  but be sure to have sufficient space for EVERYTHING that has not been securely wiped from the drive.

When you say core utilities .....  is that some utility which will securely wipe the drive?  If so there would be nothing left to recover.

The description of the fault ....  and particularly what was done to it afterwards ....  is too vague to do anything but guess.

The first thing that should have been done was to mirror the drive to another HDD, and recover attemoted from there.

It could still be done but it may be too late for a lot of the data.

So the apps ....

testdisk
photorec
dd
ddrescue

regards.

By core utilities I mean things like cp and dd.
I've linked our message to their LUG.  Perhaps
one of our Synaptic apps will help.

Thanks for your response.

If it is the partition structure that has been damaged then
testdisk
is what I would use to attempt to rebuild it.

If the data is valuable the original disk should not be worked on.

A bit copy of the disk should be made on another drive - using dd - and then the recovery should be done from the copy.

regards.

[Hootiegibbon]

Another good contender is Foremost - again in the repo

EDIT:

There is no real reason to suggest any external distro's, we have the tools available in our repo for data rescue, many of which are available on our own remasters that are available for download

Jase

[AndrzejL]

Photorec is good but it was unable to help me... I have shift / deleted avi files by accident and I was trying to recover them - I have made sure all the files extensions were ticked in the options and I made sure that I was saving the files to the partition with far to much space. I got a lot of stuff recovered, partition was not even 20% full, but none of my videos got recovered. It was disappointing. Not sure - maybe I did something wrong but I seriously doubt that...

Regards.

Andy

[dvhenry]

There's a fellow up here at the local northern Illinois Linux User's Group
with a 2 TB hard drive.   Well portions of the drive have crashed.   The
core utilities haven't worked.   What should be recommended as a first
choice to recover some damaged data from this hard drive ?

You don't state what hard drive PCLOS is on, but just use a liveCD.(never risk writing to a disk you are recovering data from)

Well portions of the drive have crashed.

what do you mean? Is there a SMART monitoring program installed and have the logs been checked for a failing disk? Have partitions become unreadable? or what? the tool to use varies according to the situation.

For example,
TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk recover partitions, undelete files on some file systems etc.
PhotoRrec http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec recover many 'file types' or just the few 'file types' you need the most.
Myrescue http://myrescue.sourceforge.net/ can skip physically damaged sections of the disk and return to them when the rest of the recovery is completed, reducing the risk of further data loss.
Extundelete http://extundelete.sourceforge.net/ restores deleted files on ext3/ext4 filesystems, can restore both the files and the file names.

And of course, save the files to a location other than the disk you are working on, and do not install a recovery program to that disk!

Edited to clarify the obvious!!

[Yankee]

There's a fellow up here at the local northern Illinois Linux User's Group
with a 2 TB hard drive.   Well portions of the drive have crashed.   The
core utilities haven't worked.   What should be recommended as a first
choice to recover some damaged data from this hard drive ?

You don't state what hard drive PCLOS is on, but just use a liveCD.

Well portions of the drive have crashed.

what do you mean? Is there a SMART monitoring program installed and have the logs been checked for a failing disk? Have partitions become unreadable? or what? the tool to use varies acording to the situation.

For example,
TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk recover partitions, undelete files on some file systems etc.
PhotoRrec http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec recover many 'file types' or just the few 'file types' you need the most.
Myrescue http://myrescue.sourceforge.net/ can skip physically damaged sections of the disk and return to them when the rest of the recovery is completed, reducing the risk of further data loss.
Extundelete http://extundelete.sourceforge.net/ restores deleted files on ext3/ext4 filesystems, can restore both the files and the file names.

And of course, save the files to a location other than the disk you are working on.

Hi,

And thanks for the response(s).

I want to find out too what he is going to use that actually worked, want to install it on my
OpenBox Bonsai rescue/backup flashdrive I use.   dd_rescue is the only thing tried so far, which failed to work 100%.
There are 145 MB's that are reading as bad areas on the drive he said.  So one of our solutions from Synaptic
would be a next step.  Just a few video files lost so no great emergency.  I'll post back later FYI.

Have a good one.

FF

@HootieG - Foremost, used by the Air Force, is the one I would try first I'm thinking   THX.

[Hootiegibbon]

All the PCLinuxOS iso's are capable of conducting rescue operations, Iced Latte has many rescue apps installed by default  ddrescue, dd_rescue, formost and more

Everybody on the forum has access to the tools required.

Jase

[daniel]

an another tool in our repo could
Running Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier

Description

Recovers files from disks with physical damage. Allows you to copy files
from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give
errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every
readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method
most types of files can be made useable even if some parts of the file
were not recoverable in the end.

The program can be used as a daily backup system using its batch mode
functions. A list of transfers can be saved to a file and then run from
the command line to perform the same batch of transfers on a regular
basis without having to use the GUI interface. The program supports
command line parameters which allow the application to be run from
schedulers or scripts so it can be fully integrated into daily server
tasks.