You can easily destroy your whole system by misusing ddrescue, for example when you pass the wrong device name to ddrescue. Do not continue if you are not comfortable with Unix and the terminal.Information about detected bad sectors are stored in a log file that can be used to perform a re-read in a next run Contrary to the well known dd command, it performs a smart copy algorithm that skips bad sectors and tries to copy all good sectors first.ddrescue can be used to get low level access to the hard drive and perform a copy of the whole device.What now? Recover as much data as possible! Create a raw disc image copy with ddrescue TestDisk tries to analyse and recover lost partitionsĪt the beginning the analysis on the failing device looked OK, but the process crashed each try without success. ddrescue: Copies failing block devices like hard drives, CDs to file or other block devices.įor me TestDisk’s partition structure analysis algorithm failed because of too many corrupted sectors.

This procedure is quite easy actually and well documented.

TestDisk: If the issue is caused due to non-mechanical problems, like when you got a corrupted partition table, then TestDisk should be able to recover the trashed disk.

Installation of necessary toolsĮither you are using a bootable Live system like KNOPPIX that is shipped with all tools needed, or install them manually on your machine: The amount of possible lost data is approximately 40 GB of pictures/videos and 1 GB of documents like. “The drive is not formatted, do you want to format it now?” Of course, Windows nor Ubuntu is able to mount the disk anymore and the Disk Manager displays the first primary partition as RAW, with Windows prompting:

OMG! A friend dropped a 2 TB WD elements external harddrive while it was connected to the PC with active write operations. Follow the steps below only if your data is not crucial to you. I take no responsibility for the loss of any data. This is my take on recovering data from my friends broken hard drive. Warranty: I am not a professional in data recovery. I had to recover data from a broken external hard drive and my typical go to recovery software failed ( TestDisk), because the disk’s hardware was severely damaged. Introduction to Data Recovery with free Unix Tools

Cgsecurity photorec