Harddrive recovery

[DJ-1701]

We've all had it in the past, a machine which is running some important software or stores useful data and tools and... the hard drive goes and the data or partitions becomes corrupt, possibly with a lovely tick, tick, tick sound, and for whatever reason, what a nightmare, there is no backup!

 

What free or paid for software would you recommend in this day to do a recovery?

 

Another question, in this day and age of GDPR, do you know any software that would work with an Encrypted Drive? (BitLocker, McAfee, VeraCrypt, etc.)

[Katy]

M3 Data Recovery says it will work with damaged BitLocker drives (you will still need the password or recovery key though)

[tg12]

I use DMDE for data recovery. It can be quite advanced at times but I’ve had very good results from it. The amount of alcohol and chocolate I’ve been bought because I’ve rescued the data of someone’s disk that’s on the verge of dying can attest to that!

[chazzy2501]

spinrite! amazing software, if software can fix it, this is the product, run in a dos clone and don't care what format the drive is in as it just works on sectors.

 

https://GRC.com

[dapaulio]

I use ZAR (paid version) and R-Studio (Paid) before now and generally had more successfully recoverys than unsuccessful.

 

rstudio (and I think ZAR) will give you an indication of whether it can be recovered before buying a license

Edited May 4, 2018 by dapaulio

[dapaulio]

spinrite! amazing software, if software can fix it, this is the product, run in a dos clone and don't care what format the drive is in as it just works on sectors.

 

https://GRC.com

 

Oh yeah forgot about GRC... great tool. if GRC cant recover it then I doubt any can

[DJ-1701]

Oh yeah forgot about GRC... great tool. if GRC cant recover it then I doubt any can

 

I would point out that Spinrite works on repairing that single drive itself and not coping data off, so if there is a terminal fault with the drive, excessive use of the drive might be for naught, where recovery to another drive may at least give you some data. Still, an excellent, old and trusted tool though, mostly now heard through legend, passed from technician to technician.

[dapaulio]

I would point out that Spinrite works on repairing that single drive itself and not coping data off, so if there is a terminal fault with the drive, excessive use of the drive might be for naught, where recovery to another drive may at least give you some data. Still, an excellent, old and trusted tool though, mostly now heard through legend, passed from technician to technician.

 

Yes my boss used to have a copy which never left his side. I’m sure we recovered data using it before now but sounds like I’m mistaken.

[chazzy2501]

Spinrite on level 2 only asks the drive to sequentially read the drive and if the drive spots errors spinrite kicks in. Level 4 is the heavy read, write invert, read, write invert again. Spinrite will also let you know if the drive shouldn't be run as it close to hardware failure.

[Farloch]

Spinright is very good at getting the drive to read the data one last time and then moves it to a safe sector and marks the damaged sector as bad. I ran a scan for the best part of 5 days once on a drive which had become unbootable. I just left it doing its thing and it eventually moved the data off the damaged sector. I was then able to clone the drive to a new one and the user was back in business again.

[DJ-1701]

Spinright isn't a bad price either, running at $89... though I wonder if it would be any use when the world finally moves everything over to SSDs. Some time I go, I know.

[Arthur]

ddrescue (a.k.a. gddrescue in Ubuntu) is also very good for free.

 

GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disk, cd-rom, etc) to another, trying to rescue the good parts first in case of read errors.

 

The basic operation of ddrescue is fully automatic. That is, you don't have to wait for an error, stop the program, restart it from a new position, etc.

 

If you use the mapfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently, (only the needed blocks are read). Also you may interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. The mapfile is an essential part of ddrescue's effectiveness. Use it unless you know what you are doing.

 

Ddrescue does not write zeros to the output when it finds bad sectors in the input, and does not truncate the output file if not asked to. So, every time you run it on the same output file, it tries to fill in the gaps without wiping out the data already rescued.

[DJ-1701]

ddrescue (a.k.a. gddrescue in Ubuntu) is also very good for free.

 

Too bad the Windows Subsystem for Linux in Windows 10 doesn't support block devices (https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/689), otherwise it could be used there as well.

[AlanD]

...well, overlooking that keeping important data on a disk without any backup copy is pretty careless...my "bette noir" is students and staff saving an updated file with the same filename so that it overwrites the previous version only to later discover that this later version isn't intact...I always keep telling them never to click save, always "save as" and increment a version number at the end....despite endless reminders I am beginning to realise that its not until they lose their work they start taking my advice. Its the same with those that won't buy screen protects and covers for mobile phones. Why do they always buy them after they have cracked the case or cracked the screen?

 

But my son as teenager (now a senior programmer...) took his disk which had failed (tick ..tick .. ticking...) and shoved it in a freezer overnight...then put it back in his rig...to discover it worked fine ...for long enough to copy the data off ....I was impressed with his ingenuity... so its worth a try I guess....

[smarties11]

If the drive is ticking then it's likely a read head fault, and software will not help. It needs sending away for a physical recovery. The more you fiddle with it and keep it running, the less your chances of recovery. I've used a company called R3 Data Recovery for a family member with great success (http://www.r3datarecovery.com). It cost £300 IIRC on their lowest priority service - and they recovered the drive within 5 days.

 

HTH