2.5" Hard Drive - Recovering data

Right - so just a (late) update, ddrescue saved the day. I had some trouble imaging the whole drive, so in the end just created an image of a single NTFS partition. It took ages to complete, but in the end there was only a handful of data which just wanted to RIP.

Mounted the image, copied all the data to an external drive - sorted!

Thanks to everyone for all the pointers and help, really appreciate it.
 
sajunky said:
I made actually two points, maybe not clear:
1. When drive is failing, working on USB interface doesn't help, as USB do not handle disk errors correctly. Native SATA interface is an absolute requirement when drive shows errors/delays during reading.

2. Working on the ailing drive, trying to access file system puts drive on the stress, if is going to die, it would die quicker. But using check disk and other utilities attemting to write to the disk, it takes it to the next level, it will accelerate deterioration of the file system and make more difficult for recovery.

I don't say, these utilities messed up or did something wrong, I don't know, all I say is that they shouldn't be used in the first place.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this. My dad's hard drive is poked and attached it to an external usb interface, needless to say I came up with zip. I'll try and external SATA interface. Ta mate
 
Flidiot said:
Right - so just a (late) update, ddrescue saved the day. I had some trouble imaging the whole drive, so in the end just created an image of a single NTFS partition. It took ages to complete, but in the end there was only a handful of data which just wanted to RIP.
Click to expand...

Depending on how much data a person usually has on their laptops I split the HDD into two partitions for them and then setup syncing of their data/mail between the two partitions. Should a drive suffer from platter damage in future or even just logical failure you have a much better chance of recovering the data as you have two instances of it. I did this many moons ago to mates hdd and forgot about it, drive got damaged exactly like yours and I sent it of to a DR company in jhb but my mate was not prepared to to pay the quote price so I got the drive back and started looking at it, the physical damage was confined to the first partition and you could read data just fine off the second partition and that's when I found the backup folder I created :D

This however will not help for damaged heads and other hardware issues.
 
ponder said:
Depending on how much data a person usually has on their laptops I split the HDD into two partitions for them and then setup syncing of their data/mail between the two partitions. Should a drive suffer from platter damage in future or even just logical failure you have a much better chance of recovering the data as you have two instances of it. I did this many moons ago to mates hdd and forgot about it, drive got damaged exactly like yours and I sent it of to a DR company in jhb but my mate was not prepared to to pay the quote price so I got the drive back and started looking at it, the physical damage was confined to the first partition and you could read data just fine off the second partition and that's when I found the backup folder I created :D

This however will not help for damaged heads and other hardware issues.
Click to expand...

That is actually a damn good idea!

Your solution would actually be ideal in this situation. Although there are external drives as well as a home server to backup data to...how often do you think that actually happens? :p

Mail luckily isn't an issue at all - we have a hosted Exchange server to look after that. Data though is a big issue.

Guess what I am gonna be doing the weekend? haha...
 
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