What is Digg?30 Comments
- toomuchgreentea, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Unless the hard drive CAN'T spin or the read-write head ISN'T working - it's NOT dead.
- DelMonte, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Maybe a bird is stuck inside the drive?
- Hurricane, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The ONLY way a truly DEAD drive can be recovered is in a clean room with the platters re-mounted in a good drive chassis.
If you can read sectors then the drive is NOT DEAD, it has just been altered in such a way that you need software to recover the lost filesystem, which BTW there are MUCH cheaper alternatives than the $1600 one mentioned above. - kodek, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Teach me how to recover data from a hard drive that makes more noise than a chainsaw and I'll digg it.
- jambarama, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Contact me at jambarama at gmail dot com and I can try to help. I understand, it sucks to lose data.
- pct85, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yet another disk recovery blog that fails to point out some very important information. While the rest of the blog is quite helpful, hard drive failures can occur for many varied reasons. Just listening to the drive will often tell you. Does it spin up? No - it's beyond mere mortals. Does it make a clicking noise? Yes - ddrescue as in the blog will probably help. No clicking and it might just be a partial electronics failure. In such cases, hdparam will allow you to turn off some advanced drive features that will get around the part of the electronic component that has failed. I've had 100% recovery of a few failed drives simply by turning off DMA access. (hdparam -d 0 /dev/hda) Other hdparam options can also help. Man hdparam for more information! Note however, that hdparam is most useful on IDE PATA devices. YMMV for SATA. For USB & SCSI, hdparam is next to useless.
- XenophobicAlien, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've got a master drive in my pc right now that "chirps" every so often. I'm guessing it will soon be dead. Anyone know what causes the chirping sound?
- antdude, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I used this tool once. Basically, I had a very slow dying HDD. It reads like 300 KB/sec (yes that slow) but it still worked. I used this tool to copy to another HDD and it took about a whole day to complete. Great tool even when it was my first time.
- Haroldx, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Uhh, I just lost like all my music on an ext3 partition, every time I try to view it in nautilus, it just freezes up. If I cd to the directory, it works fine, but when I ls it doesn't show the contents, and gnome-terminal freezes. I got on my windows partition and tried to open it up, but it just said that drive M: (music partition) needs to be formatted.
Does anyone know what might have happened, and how I can get it back?
I'm running Arch Linux 7.2, and I just recently synced with the repository.
The latest packages are at http://archlinux.org/packages/search/?sort=-last_update
Any help would be appreciated :]
Thanks diggers :D - fak3r, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2http://duggmirror.com/linux_unix/How_To_Recover_Data_From_a_dead_hard_drive_using_ddrescue/
- ceralor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Why are these people, besides the pirate person, being dugg down?
- regeya, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Dugg down mainly because I'm sure we've seen such tutorials since I've been around (and I've not been around overly long.) But I'd digg it down for any number of reasons, and here's two:
- 'If you're using Ubuntu Linux:' -- ugh. Either point out that yes, you can get a shell via sudo, or point out that you need to precede the command with 'sudo' if you're doing it as user on Ubuntu Linux. Yes, Debian zealots, we get that Ubuntu irritates you. Get over it.
- Advocates the use of dd_rescue. And this brings up a related pet peeve: Why is the Debian package for dd_rescue named ddrescue? ddrescue and dd_rescue are two separate pieces of software, with GNU ddrescue being superior:
http://www.toad.com/gnu/sysadmin/index.html#ddrescue
For Ubuntu users that would be 'gddrescue'; it's in the Universe repo. I'm assuming that since it's Universe that it's actually a Debian package; an apt-cache search ddrescue should find it.
The big difference is that ddrescue can keep track of the bad sectors, and go back and try to do a slow read of that data. dd_rescue will slow down and read more carefully, yeah, but ddrescue is more thorough. Personal experience tells me that dd_rescue is ok for slightly wonky drives/removable media, but ddrescue is better for the slowly-dying-hard-drive variety of problem. - digg0t, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Is there a way of doing something similar in Windows? With some 3rd party software?
- fak3r, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I came across this a few months back recovering a dying drive, but you are better off with GNU ddrescue: http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html which is not a shell script like dd_rescue, but instead C code.
From a review "...combines both dd_rescue's ability to read big blocks and then shift gears, with dd_rhelp's ability to remember what parts of the disk have been looked at already. It keeps this info in a really simple logfile format, and keeps it updated every 30 seconds, or whenever it stops or is interrupted. It's written in C++ and it's small and fast." - nevster, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1If you're drive is totally cactus (won't spin up etc) you can always try this:
http://www.deadharddrive.com - mtaram, on 05/24/2008, -0/+0I nice trick to get the clicking hard drives to work ... i worked for me...
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-yo ... - robnoxious, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4I just used OnTrack for a crashed slave drive that I couldn't access. They recovered just over 1/2 of the 100MB on the drive, which accounted for about 89% of the files on the drive. I am pretty happy considering what I could have lost, most of the items where images from my digital camera of my kids for the past 6 years.
This is $1600.00 well spent and an expensive lesson on backing up my data.
PS: I found out about onTrack from a YouTube video that was posted on Digg. - 3Den, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'm wondering if this app is not all that complicated.
dd does not have to fail on error, tha'ts a fallacy.
THe last time I used dd to recover a borked drive, here is what I did:
It was a windows XP primary disk:
dd if=/dev/hda2 bs=1k conv=sync,noerror |ssh -c blowfish user@fileserver "dd of=/mnt/space/image.ntfs bs=1k"
What this says:
Dump the disk in 1k blocks (you can adjust this for speed to the minimum read block size of your device), don't abort on errors, and if there is an unreadable block, pad it out with zeros in the destination.
You can dump to a file, in my case, I used ssh and fast blowsifh encryption mode of ssh to dump to a fileserver (because that's where teh space is).
At that point, you have the best readable disk image you are going to get off the drive short of sending it to a data recover center and spending big bucks, so copy it whever you wish, fsck it as appropriate to restore integrity, and copy your data.
This is easy to do from a knoppix boot CD (or better, a knoppix flash drive)
- 3Den, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0So I have a drive that kerchunks repeatedly when it starts.
I treid the freezer route, made no difference.
anyyone have any other tips on getting this to work?
I'll try anything and post the results. - bubba9999, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0thanks - that's very informative. Off to the man pages I go.
- tupperbacharach, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I had a problem with bad blocks on a hard drive, and recovered with dd_rhelp:
http://www.chez.com/vaab/utilities/dd_rhelp/index.en.html
I remember reading an article that touted the dd_rhelp/dd_rescue combination over ddrescue/dd_rescue, but I forgot what were the the advantages.
At any rate, dd_rhelp was easy, and I now use the same drive as idle storage (full of new data, but unplugged). - wattage, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Hello. I'm very new to Linux and Data Recovery. But also very excited about both. I'm currently using Ubuntu (installed on the master drive) and have ddrescue installed. Can anyone give me an example of how to do a recovery when the "bad" drive (installed as slave drive) is NTFS (Source machine was Dell with Windows XP Pro)?
I've been able to read an image of the drive. But when I try to run fsck on the image, I encounter problems. Is it true that fsck is not designed for NTFS-formatted drives? Please advise. - 3Den, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0 fsck tools are specific to individual filesystems.
Have you tried just mounting the ntfs image? - jerwong, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2There are a number of pieces of software that can do that. I personally use Ontrack EasyRecovery for data recovery.
- gasparov, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Interesting...but
"sudo mount /dev/sda2/backup.img /mnt/recoverydata
This will mount all the data from the backup.img under /mnt/recoverydata now you can try to access the data it should work without any problem."
It always works because ddrescue its rock solid but results aren't always as expected, in my case last year a 80GB partition failed to mount ,doing a similar procedure led me to recover almost my data but losing file names,everything was in lost+found with random names (00002hc77s555)....it can be useless. - robnoxious, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2@bits&bytes
What are you talking about? There was nothing illegal on this drive. Why would I need a lawyer? - felderado, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0fsck ??
- xero9, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2A friend of mine knows someone who has some peice of software that somehow jolts the the drive and pulls off one sector at a time. Apparently very time consuming, but is supposed to be able to recover just about anything. I only wish I know the name of this software. Couldn't even get that much info from the guy.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2@robnoxious
are you serious? Couldn't you just have pirated it, i mean $1600 for a cheap lawyer, that's IF you got caught downloading it... - take2podcast, on 10/12/2007, -11/+2And if all else fails .. pray to the Jesus on the White House Lawn:
http://richwhiteblue.blogspot.com
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