After a lot of research I must say..

That the information about good software Imager are very very few. I been going trough all the threads in many of the section, 1 by 1.. googling u name it.

It comes down to :

Media Tools - That is uber slow - and biggest flaw it do not support SATA so you need to use USB which will make you loose speed.
Diskpatch - No direct access to the ATA
CopyR/HD Duplicator - Seems very suspicious, no prices, and very very little information about it in general.

Why is the situation looking like this?

I just spoke to the tech support of MEDIA TOOLS. I dont know whether they pulled a prank or not but according to them you dont need any extra CABLES AT ALL as long as you have enough SATA connectors.

The manual must be the worse written ever... anyone know anything about this?

p.s sorry about creating multiple threads, desperate times..

Why is the situation looking like this?

Probably because software based imagers can only take you so far. Since you're suggesting imaging a drive thru USB, one can only imagine that your fresh to the DR scene. Spend some cash and get a real imager.

I suggested imaging drive trough USB because it would not support SATA. Now they tell me it does support SATA without any IDE/SATA converters. And I am asking you guys that have used Media Tools and have more experience then me with it, IS THIS TRUE?
Iknow you loose speed when using USB, im not a newbie in world of computing, but yeh im a novice in the world of data recovery compared to you guys.

So for you people that have used Media Tools, can you really use it with SATA drives without the need of any converters?

If there was a cheap one below 500 euros I would get it, but there just arent.

Since I cant find any cables in Sweden that has SATA TO IDE converters, my question would be as following :

Do I loose a lot of speed or just a little thats not hardly gonna be noticable?
I talked to Prosoft support yesterday and they said I would not notice it that much in Media Tools.. is that true?

USB Dockstations would be so great to work with, just plug in hdd and plug out.. no cables no nothing. Very smooth solution!

I must be paranoid but i think some of my posts are doing dissapearing acts. especially if they mention Datacopy king...

really?

I swear i wrote you a nice long post last night ... i must have been dreaming mate. I sit too many hours in front of my computers. damn. im going insane.

lmao

Btw you got any experience from DDRescue?

p.s I love your avatar ;D

Its been quite some time since I have used Prosoft as I use hardware today but the P4 eara motherboard I used was a Sony that had two ide and a couple of sata connectors. Worked ok for recovery supporting both types of connectors with Prosoft. Usb is also supported so if your recovery platform does not have the needed connectors- it will do. The speed will get you by. Image the drive to a zeroed drive ( lower +30 retries default setting)- then use the file recovery tools.

Ok thx,

Right of now im looking into the application called DDRescue, its a very advanced tool that supports everything Media Tools does, such as reverse cloning and it runs under Linux. As far as I know it dont need no converters or anything, just plug in the SATA drives and you good to go!

Yea- thats best bet for you. Happy cloning

Thx

.. Actually I removed 80GB of data so im trying out my new tool Recover my files to get it back... boy it was simple! All my RNS files recovered with one click. And RNS only (Reason Project Files and Refills - Music Production)

Now I only need to get this baby workin in Linux!

Btw ppumkin, do you know why Media Tools require converters? Is it something about the SATA interface which doesnt make it good for fixing sectors or something? Making the old PATA better? Ive been googling but cannot find anything about it

MTP does not work with my motherboards sata interfaces, neither does CopyR.

ddrescue & dd_rescue are pretty cool free tools.

I'm currently trying CopyR which 'seems' to read bad blocks which none of the others managed to do.

Ye they sure are, right of now after digging around and learning so much harddrives then ive ever known before and a lot of trail/error, I must say DDRescue is amazing. Im having a mechanical damaged drive which im doing backup on at this moment, so far so good.. 29 errors and 6.4 GB of data saved out of 80. Its going slow since the HDD is clicking but its doing the job, much better then any other tool out there that ive tried so far id say.

Having the powerful Linux Kernel behind its back, SATA converters are now history

.
I strongly recommend anyone looking for a good tool for recover data off damaged harddrives to take a look at DDRescue, The real name in the linux distros are gddrescue, so dont exchange it for dd_rescue which is NOT the same software.

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