Using Linux to Recover File from a Faulty Drive?

Mortymoose

Mortymoose

Honorary Master
Joined
May 26, 2013
Messages
13,636
Reaction score
11,833
Location
In the Namibian desert...
Good Morning to ye wise penguin followers.....

So the drive crashed and there was no backup, yes! I know.....

There is one folder on that drive I need.....

The drive was running W10 and an accounting program.

The one folder(data) has the accounting program info on it.

Under Windows we moved the drive to an external enclosure and found out we could not access the drive.
Under disk management it showed the drive had to be initialized, which we cant do.

So we plugged the drive directly via SATA cable into another pc and using a Windows PC running R-Studio NTFS we tried again...

The Pc automatically installed the Toshiba drivers for the drive and then with Admin rights we could see
the drive on R-Studio. So we started the scan.........

During the night the techie dialed in using Teamviewer and thought the scan had frozen and restarted the scan. :X3:

Cyclic redundancy error messages kept appearing, we know!

I only need that one folder.

So I was thinking, I don't know a lot about Linux and have tinkered with a few distros in my time, Mint, Puppy in particular...
And was wondering, If I plugged this drive into a Linux machine, would I have a better chance of seeing the drive and folder,

Seeing that Linux has more tolerance for these kind of faults...?

I really cannot wait another entire day for R-Studio to scan this drive again or is there another option?

I thank you.
 
Hmmm - R-Studio is my go to and would be the most likely method to successfully recover any files, especially as there are CRC errors.
This could be drive motor/actuator; any of which will require the drive to be booked in with recovery specialists (i know you are in the stix and that is not a quick option for you)

as a last resort, and i know this sounds crazy; stick the drive in the fridge for 2-3 hours and then try access it.
*if* it works you will have a very small window to get the files off :)

Good luck!
 
Step 1: Clone the drive
Step 2: Mess around on the NEWLY cloned drive
Step 3: Leave the broken drive alone, and keep it as a last resort for professional data recovery if all else fails.

Anyone advising you to mess around with the damaged drive is a muppet, and shouldn't be trusted.

You're doing way more damage than good by messing with that drive.
 
Mortymoose said:
Good Morning to ye wise penguin followers.....

So the drive crashed and there was no backup, yes! I know.....

There is one folder on that drive I need.....

The drive was running W10 and an accounting program.

The one folder(data) has the accounting program info on it.

Under Windows we moved the drive to an external enclosure and found out we could not access the drive.
Under disk management it showed the drive had to be initialized, which we cant do.

So we plugged the drive directly via SATA cable into another pc and using a Windows PC running R-Studio NTFS we tried again...

The Pc automatically installed the Toshiba drivers for the drive and then with Admin rights we could see
the drive on R-Studio. So we started the scan.........

During the night the techie dialed in using Teamviewer and thought the scan had frozen and restarted the scan. :X3:

Cyclic redundancy error messages kept appearing, we know!

I only need that one folder.

So I was thinking, I don't know a lot about Linux and have tinkered with a few distros in my time, Mint, Puppy in particular...
And was wondering, If I plugged this drive into a Linux machine, would I have a better chance of seeing the drive and folder,

Seeing that Linux has more tolerance for these kind of faults...?

I really cannot wait another entire day for R-Studio to scan this drive again or is there another option?

I thank you.
Click to expand...
Yoh!

Speak to @SouthBit
Data recovery is his game.
He should be able to help you or talk you through some stuff. Depending on a few factors.
 
Thanks for the advice, I have just checked up on the drive that has been running since early this morning on R-Studio over the road at the local PC shop....

Owner is my mate and has gone to CPT and checks on the progress of the drive via TView. So far we can see that there are 59 FAT Directories still recoverable on the drive.

Tomorrow, one of his sales ladies will open for me so that I can hopefully recover the data file.
 
Oh! Further to my initial question. Would not save time if I just plugged the drive into a Linux OS, might be able to see the file once I mount the drive and copy it over as opposed to scanning an entire day via windows...?

Here is a pic from R-Studio after 11 Hours of scanning and still going, those of you that are familiar with the software, are the current results of the scan a good indication that I will be able to recover/copy files 2morrow?

rstudio.jpg
 
You're going to be overwriting data at some point potentially - which is going to make recovery a non event. Additionally if the drive is on its last legs in terms of hardware, then you're definitely making it worse...

If the data is valuable to you, then stop ****ing around with the original drive.... Clone it and recover from the clone...

You're throwing petrol on the fire. It may work, but there's a huge chance this is going to blow up in your face.
 
If you'd like to jab at recovering but can afford to lose the data,get a empty disk same size or larger,boot from an ubuntu live usb and use ddrescue (+gui if you like) to dd clone the disk to a sacrificial candidate. It'll clone,skip and return repeatedly narrowing the skip margins to try copy as many sectors as possible and fill the rest with blank,at which point you try to copy/recover from clone drive

If its worth real money,stop fiddling and send it in
 
Conclusion:

After two days and two sessions of scanning using R-Studio I could not find the sql file I was looking amongst all that jargon.....

I then took the drive back to work, plugged into Mint, who saw the drive, but would not mount it,
I then plugged the drive straight into a W10 machine, used Easus Data Recovery , scanned for three hours and lo and behold, I recovered the 600mb SQL file I was looking for.

I am so impressed with the Software I shall be purchasing a license....

Thanks for all the feedback and advice chaps, really special to be amongst such a crew!

/Moose makes mental note to take damaged HDD on next road trip and somewhere along the Sandveld road he shall lay it flat apon the N7 and take great joy watching the rush hour traffic mould it into the warm tar.

By the way it was a Toshiba drive.......
 
Mortymoose said:
Conclusion:

After two days and two sessions of scanning using R-Studio I could not find the sql file I was looking amongst all that jargon.....

I then took the drive back to work, plugged into Mint, who saw the drive, but would not mount it,
I then plugged the drive straight into a W10 machine, used Easus Data Recovery , scanned for three hours and lo and behold, I recovered the 600mb SQL file I was looking for.

I am so impressed with the Software I shall be purchasing a license....

Thanks for all the feedback and advice chaps, really special to be amongst such a crew!

/Moose makes mental note to take damaged HDD on next road trip and somewhere along the Sandveld road he shall lay it flat apon the N7 and take great joy watching the rush hour traffic mould it into the warm tar.

By the way it was a Toshiba drive.......
Click to expand...
Now buy acronis to make frequent backups
 
Mortymoose said:
I have ordered three external 1Tb drives for three PC's at work that have no BAckup on them...... Dont fancy wasting a week of my life again going through this..... The English HO was in a different zone.....
Click to expand...
Well seeing that you run a business with several PCs and potentially important, consider a cloud backup.
 
Dan C said:
Well seeing that you run a business with several PCs and potentially important, consider a cloud backup.
Click to expand...

The entire system here runs to Mr.BackUp, so the main stuff is fine, we have five PC's that we use independently of the main setup, only two of those have their own little backup drives....
 
Mortymoose said:
The entire system here runs to Mr.BackUp, so the main stuff is fine, we have five PC's that we use independently of the main setup, only two of those have their own little backup drives....
Click to expand...
Cool, wasn't quite sure of your setup. :p
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X