[ale] Extreme Practical Data Recovery (Part 2)

Robert Reese~ ale at sixit.com
Tue Jul 22 13:13:47 EDT 2008


Hi Robert,

> I have been taking suggestions from the previous thread for
> recovering data.  PhotoRec is awesome and gddrescue is looking good
> too.  However, I wanted to know your experiences with ddrescue.

I'm afraid I haven't tried them.


> I know it can take days sometime to copy a drive depending on
> how bad the condition of the drive it.  But I was wondering.  What is
> typical?

Yes, especially if you're into bad sectors.


>  Should I plan on keeping this drive and computer I am
> recovering with out for a week or so?

Yes.  I have an old computer that has little use to it except for menial tasks such as HDD recovery.  I set it up with an external USB harddrive and let it recover.  Last time I did an 80G HDD it took a little over a week.


> Once it is past the bad
> sectors does the speed pick back up?

Yes.


> I am asking becuse this run at ddrescue has been running almost 24
> hours now and I am at 3.5 gigs of 80.  I am hoping it will pick
> back up soon.

That sounds about right, unfortunately.


> Another question.  My HDD problems seem to be at the beginning of
> the drive.  Is there a way to run photorec or something from the
> end of the drive?

There are actually some very good Windows apps, as well as at one that runs off a floppy made by programming wizard Steve Gibson called SpinRite 6.0.  I've had decent luck with Zero Assumption's ZA Recovery <http://www.z-a-recovery.com/> which allows you to specify where on the disk you want to search and will allow you to stop and save your progress, and resume later.

Steve Gibson's program doesn't recover the data but it does "fix" the harddrive and IMHO finds data that others miss.  It seems expensive, but it really isn't.  <http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm>  FYI, he *hand-codes* all his programs in ASSEMBLY!  His skills are gobsmacking.  ;c)

Cheers,
Robert Reese~



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