Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
January 9th, 2021, 7:49
I needed to recover some data from failing HDD, and I chose bad approach at first, maybe damaging HDD even more, but I managed to run ddrescue after all (used ddrescue -d -n -R /dev/sdc /dev/sdb mapfile) and now I am cloning that HDD to new one. I used -n to get all non damaged data I can and then I want to try -r to get something from damaged data. However I am not sure I understand how this works, and I am not sure whether it can damage that cloned data on new HDD, or does it add those damaged data to new HDD? Then I wonder how will I get the data from cloned disk. I want to create copy (maybe image?) of the new cloned disk (or its data) and try to get as much data as possible. Just mentioning that I am using SystemRescue copied to RAM on laptop.
For the first part of subject: I have some other HDDs at home salvaged from laptops or not working external HDDs, is there any possible universal way to check them or fix them eventually? I don't need any data from them also I don't mind if they get damaged in the process, I can salvage parts from them eventually.
For instance few of them cannot be opened in Windows, but I am able to disable automount so they won't be mounted automatically, but I don't know how to proceed, how to check them, possibly try to fix them? Some of them may be possibly damaged physically and I know I shouldn't use chkdsk probably.
Thank you for any advice.