Hello Antonio, This is a long-winded message, so I hope you will bear with me. :)
First I want to thank you for writing software that has helped so many people. I have been scouring the net for the past week or so learning as much as I can about the right way to do data recovery. I want to learn so I can better help others, too. I work as a PC Desktop Support technician and more and more frequently, I encounter users with unbootable hard drives. Most recently, one of these users happened to be my best friend. His PC, which I built for him a few years ago, died -- XP won't boot, blah blah blah... And now it's up to me to recover as much data as I can from his HD. Now, I'm not looking for a step-by-step, hold-my-hand troubleshooting session from you. I'm sure you don't have time for that. What I'm asking for is direction and guidance. Let me tell you what I've done so far: 1. Removed the damaged HD and connected it to a different PC. 2. BIOS and XP detect the drive. SMART indicates imminent failure. XP shows a drive letter for it, but will not read any of its contents. 3. Testdisk did not detect any partitions. The "Search!" found the partition on the backup sector, but it failed to overwrite the existing Sector 0. Repeated attempts produced the same results. 4. Get Data Back for NTFS saw the drive once but could not read off any data. Repeated attempts resulted in it no longer detecting the drive. 5. Spinrite (on Level 2) would never get past Sector 0. I forced it to start again at 0.4% and left it running Friday when I left work. I hope the drive is not dead when I return Monday. 6. Knoppix sees the drive. But cannot mount it to drag-and-drop files to a USB drive. Plus, since I am an amateur at Linux, I did not try anything without learning more. 7. Pray. Since all of the above have failed (I don't have much faith in Spinrite at this point), I turned to Google. As an aside, what is the deal with Spinrite? What does it do? How does it fit into the data recovery field? It seems pretty stumped w/ my friend's HD at the moment. Thoughts? With Google, I have been reading articles, forums, newsgroups, and your ddrescue's E-mail archive. I've also downloaded several Live CDs for data recovery (Knoppix, RIP, Helix, System Rescue CD, etc.). But since the majority of these are Linux-based, I've hesitated launching any of them. >From what I've read, it seems to be best practice to first try creating an >image of the damaged hard drive onto a new or blank hard drive of equal or greater size. From what I've read, your "ddrescue" software is perfectly suited for this task. Is this correct? I've also read how it differs from "dd" and "dd_rescue". Your software's design is praised as being the more efficient approach -- image all the easy to read sectors first, then come back and work on the damaged ones. That makes sense. I need clarification on the physical setup of this step. Including the damaged drive, does it require a total of two hard drives (damaged + target drive) or three (damaged + target + drive w/ OS)? Currently my setup is as follows: 1. Primary HD (master drive on IDE1; non-empty -- contains one partition w/ Windows XP but sufficient free space to hold the entire contents of the damaged HD) 2. DVD-ROM (slave drive on IDE1) 3. Damaged HD (single drive on IDE2) 4. An available external USB HD. Is this a workable setup? I read that the HD that will receive the image of the damaged HD should be new or empty. What's the best way to make it "empty"? The next step, per your instructions, is to repair the image that "ddrescue" creates. The "fsck" tool seems to be the most commonly used way to do so. But I've read that it does not work with NTFS partitions. Is that true? If so, what tool do I use to repair an NTFS image? My hunch is that it will be the "ntfsfix" tool which is part of the "ntfsprogs" package. Please help. Again, referring to your instructions, once the image has been repaired, the next step is to mount the image and use various tools for data recovery. Assuming I can successfully pull and repair and image, which tool(s) would you recommend using for this mounting and recovery step? Again, in my case it will be an NTFS (Windows XP) partition. Congratulations on making it to the end of my message! I look forward to your expert advice. If you need any clarification about my situation, please let me know. Thank you very much! James _______________________________________________ Bug-ddrescue mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-ddrescue
