Comments on: Yet another accident

By: Kingsly

Kingsly — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 02:23:56 +0000

Don’t try software based methods.. if the heads are misaligned you’ll permanently damage the physical media.

If it’s worth it use a professional recovery service. It’s expensive around 10-15k per disk I think. But you should get quite a bit of your data back.

A friend of mine recovered stuff from a crashed hard disk, I can get you the contact details if you want. It’s in Bangalore though.

By: B.

B. — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:43:09 +0000

Hi,

I second what has been said here. Take your drive out of the enclosure, seal it tightly in a plastic bag so that moisture doesn’t get to it (that would be bad), put it in the freezer for a few hours.

Then put it in your computer and ddrescue the hell out of it as fast as you can. You’ll probably want to rescue the disk image (/dev/sd[x]), rather than individual files, for efficiency. If the partition table got damaged, you won’t be able to mount the disk anyway.

And then you can follow the steps I documented here a while back to recover the files from the disk image. Bottom line is: if you’ve managed to extract a disk image, even partially damaged, chances are good you will be able to recover a good number of your files.

Good luck!

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:57:46 +0000

You could try SpinRite (http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm). It’s a bit pricey, but it’s still cheaper than many specialized data recovery services.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:49:27 +0000

Provided you are NOT hearing any clicking sounds coming from the drive, there area a number of things you can try. Of course, you should assume the next time you try to access the drive is going to be your last. That said, the freezer trick works well for some drives. I also agree that the drive should be removed from the enclosure. Also consider unloading the ehci_hcd module thereby forcing the device to USB 1.1. I have had this work for me in the past with failing drives.
Good luck.

By: devel0per

devel0per — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 18:17:35 +0000

“device descriptor read/64, error -71″ – that error just about SATA/IDE controller, not about your HDD, usually. Just move HDD into another box.

By: nicu

nicu — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:01:12 +0000

Ouch!…
I also read success stories about taking the disk out from the USB enclosure and connecting directly to SATA/IDE interface, as it should be a normal hdd after all.

By: mutlu

mutlu — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:37:51 +0000

There is a very useful tool called testdisk. It is a little difficult to use at first and it can, of course, cause irreparable damage like any attempt at recovery, but it did it for me once.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

By: DanaKil

DanaKil — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 12:30:49 +0000

http://tsdgeos.blogspot.com/2009/02/ddrescue-to-rescue.html

By: Paul Mellors

Paul Mellors — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 11:50:25 +0000

I know it’s an opensuse blog, but maybe this will help? [it's mainly for the images]

http://www.suseblog.com/linux-tool-resurrects-deleted-images

By: ruurd

ruurd — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 11:48:14 +0000

Agree with Richard here. Does it make clicking sounds???