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lexsys
Asked: 2010-05-21 00:30:23 +0800 CST

Rescue data from damaged hard disk

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I have a 500 GB hard drive with one NTFS-partition on it. I can mount it with Ubuntu and view the contents. But when I try to copy something, I get an I/O error.

Ok, I tried to make its image with dd. I/O error as soon as it starts.

I have installed ddrescue, but its manual page says not to use it with drives, failing on I/O.

Can I manage to get some information from this drive and how to do this?

hard-drive linux data-recovery

2 Answers

  1. The whole point of ddrescue is that it is designed to be run on drives that you can't gain access to in any other way. You'll want to run it as few times as possible, in order to get an image of the disk. Then you can run tools against that image to try and recover files - I quite like Foremost.

    See also this Ubuntu wiki page for some really good information on recovering data.

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  2. Best Answer

    SpinRite is the right tool to detect and correct this kind of low-level read error.

    I have saved many hard disks this way. Although in one case a hard disk was beyond repair and a data recovery service company also gave up.

    I use SpinRite 6.0 and it costs USD$89. Note that in some cases SpinRite hangs if there are USB hardisks connnected to the computer. The work-around is to remove the power from USB hardisks. If the trouble is with a USB hardisk then a work-around is to take the hard disk out of the enclosure and put it into the computer, connected as a normal SATA harddisk.

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