Hi folks. I had to recover some data the other day for the 1st time in quite a while. I was quite surprised to find that what sees the majority of the data recovery software being offered does not load to bootable media.

Windows has always written data to every drive I've ever connected to a system to support its System Volume Information and $RECYCLE.BIN.

Am I missing something? Even if you mount a drive in a USB case and connect it to a Windows system as I've seen recommended, that data is still written to the drive. I'm able to turn off System Restore for drives after they've been connected to a system. But is there really any way to prevent data for System Volume Information and $RECYCLE.BIN support being written before connecting drives?

I've never found any information that indicates it's possible, and am a bit surprised that there are so many data recovery software products being offered that won't boot from external media.

It can be done with write protecting hardware devices.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Well I had to google PC3K, MRT, HRT and "hardware based tool". You folks here are deep into this. Those devices are pretty pricey and seem targeted towards serious professionals. Without spending a lot, I was thinking more in terms of software like:

* Active Boot Disk
* Data Rescue Professional
* EaseUS EasyRecovery
* Ontrack EasyRecovery
* R-Studio
* Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery
* GetDataBack
* Runtime GetDataBack

Some of these offer a bootable media creator. This is the non-destructive approach I've always gone down in the past.


This sounds like the most practical solution for what I'm looking at. I haven't used ddrescue, but I have used a few other software imaging programs that can mount an image as a drive in Windows. Data can only be read from the image file. But the process would require writing the image file to a drive of equal or greater capacity that again would require an investment of more than a few bucks. But I guess this must be the approach software vendors like the ones I listed must expect people to take.
.

Hi!



With ddrescue you can clone the patient HDD to another one. This software uses log file so you can interrupt the process whenever you want and also keep you inform about bad or unreadable sectors.



Yes, you need another HDD to use as destination with equal or greater capacity. But it is in pursuit of data preservation so i think that worth it.

Best!

F

if drive is in working order, boot to MHDD to disable the partition table sector 0 from 55AA to 5500, this will prevent for the logical volumes to mount and you will still have access to the physical drive, nothing will be writing to the drive....