Hi guys, reporting back after using hddsuperclone (hddsc):
It recovered just as much data as ddrescue, but I believe this is down to the nature of the issue with my drive:
The drive seems to be healthy overall, but with the one critical flaw that it would become unresponsive if it tried in any way to read any sectors in the first 8 or 9 % of the drive. (see my mapfile image in original post). I should add, with hddsuperclone, if I unplugged and re-connected the dead drive, and ran the command again, it would recover a few extra kb each time, so as Jared suggested, using hardware recovery tools which auto power-cycle the device would probably have yielded more data.
Since the first chunk of the drive wasn't recovered I assume the area with the boot info (MBR?) was never recovered.
So I cloned the drive, but it wouldn't mount and so was inaccessible.
Since this point I have formatted the destination drive and ran hddsc again to create an image file instead, I used these commands to ensure it read backwards only:
sudo hddsuperclone -s /dev/sdd -t image.dd -f hddsc.log --reverse --ata --no-phase2 --no-trim --do-divide2
Now with this image file, I thought I could use OSFMount to mount the image, but obviously that didn't work due to the missing first 9% of the drive!
Now I'm unsure exactly how to proceed, ideally I would like to just access it to extract some important files like my windows users folders..
I believe I need to use TestDisk? any help / advice / pointers on how to proceed would be appreciated.
Thanks!
It recovered just as much data as ddrescue, but I believe this is down to the nature of the issue with my drive:
The drive seems to be healthy overall, but with the one critical flaw that it would become unresponsive if it tried in any way to read any sectors in the first 8 or 9 % of the drive. (see my mapfile image in original post). I should add, with hddsuperclone, if I unplugged and re-connected the dead drive, and ran the command again, it would recover a few extra kb each time, so as Jared suggested, using hardware recovery tools which auto power-cycle the device would probably have yielded more data.
Since the first chunk of the drive wasn't recovered I assume the area with the boot info (MBR?) was never recovered.
So I cloned the drive, but it wouldn't mount and so was inaccessible.
Since this point I have formatted the destination drive and ran hddsc again to create an image file instead, I used these commands to ensure it read backwards only:
sudo hddsuperclone -s /dev/sdd -t image.dd -f hddsc.log --reverse --ata --no-phase2 --no-trim --do-divide2
Now with this image file, I thought I could use OSFMount to mount the image, but obviously that didn't work due to the missing first 9% of the drive!
Now I'm unsure exactly how to proceed, ideally I would like to just access it to extract some important files like my windows users folders..
I believe I need to use TestDisk? any help / advice / pointers on how to proceed would be appreciated.
Thanks!
