Hi gurus !!

I need one advice !!

I have one hdd with mechanical issues that is repaired. My next problem is that it's encrypted and I can't extract the data.

Then I need to clone the disk, but it have some bad sectors and it fails when I try to clone it.

What can I do to clone this drive? What's the best metod/soft/tool?

Thanks a lot !!!!!

Ok, one thing at a time...
Let's start with a disk (any disk) that has bad sectors and needs to be cloned........

Use an appropriate tool. Are you using Ghost to clone it? You can force it to ignore bad sectors (otherwise it will stop on bad sectors), but it's not a good idea unless you only have a handful of them, say a hundred or less. If you're not using Ghost, now's not the time to start. I never recommend it even on a healthy disk with a healthy file system. It's a Symantec product, and therefore by definition, garbage. Using Ghost for any data recovery purpose is essentially the same as driving nails with a screwdriver.

Try ddrescue (not dd_rescue), which is GNU freeware. It knows how to work around bad sectors by breaking the area up around them, and "homing in" on the sectors. If you have a suitably sized drive to copy onto, Copyr.dma might work, but it almost never seems to work for me, crashing on almost every computer I have ever tried it on. It also doesn't support drives over 128GB. Media Tools Pro is useful if you know how to use it, but it's not really a beginner's tool, as you need to know how to adjust its timings.

Now, for an encrypted disk........
How is it encrypted? Is it a software like TrueCrypt or Compusec? Is it a hardware encryption like that built into some RAID cards? Does the disk have full disk encryption support? A disk encrypted by a RAID card can be freely copied onto another disk of equivalent LBA capacity in 95% of cases. Put the new disk in and the card either won't know the difference, won't care, or will just treat it as a disk replacement. If the drive is encrypted by an onboard encryption processor, you're screwed for copying it unless you have the key, because the drive's ATA security feature won't let you touch the data even if it is encrypted and you wouldn't be able to make sense of it. If the disk is encrypted with software based FDE, the same applies as to RAID card based encryption, the encryption software won't know the difference and will just work with it.

We can't help you break into an encrypted volume here, simply because for all practical purposes, it can't be done.



When you do try to copy this disk, what happens? Are you sure the sectors are bad or is there simply a read error message? When you try to scan the drive with MHDD, what happens?

encrypted hard drives are a pain to do
its not by anychance a vista encrypted drive

Thanks Zorb for your answer.

The disk is encrypted by Pointsec. I know that it's too difficult extract the data, so I'm truyng to clone the drive.

By now I tried to clene the drive with forensic hard clone tools and the process always fali.

Now I'm scaning the disk with MHDD, when the scan finish I wiil post the results here.

Thanks a lot.

The problem with Pointsec is that there are certain critical sectors that must be read without error for the decryption to work. You will have to clone the entire disk to the best of your ability and then remove the encryption from the drive with the user's key. Only after that point can you know if the decryption was successful. We have worked with many Pointsec drives and sometimes only a few unreadable sectors in the "right" place can kill the process.

Truecrypt seems to be very error tolerant. As long as you back up the header when you create the volume, it works very well to recover from media damage.

Thank to all for your advices.

Finally I launch MHDD Scan with Remap option. The disk appears with more of thousand bad sectors but MHDD had "repaired" a lot of them and I have been able to boot the pc with the original disk.

Then I save the data with a external disk, so finally I don't clone the disk.