Hi All,

I have WD hard drive 500GB which most of the time does not recognize by the bios.
By connecting the hard drive with SATA to USB adaptor I succeeded to have access through GetMyDataBack for NTFS.
Now the software is scanning the disk but I'm afraid that the hard drive will shut it self down or will be permanentlly damaged before the program finish the scanning.
Should I let the software to scan the entire disk (8-10 hours) or to stop in the middle and move on to the recovery step (step 3) which does not recommended by the software?

Does this scanning good for anything?


Many Thanks!

I do not think this type of recovery is really an option. You should consider cloning first. Alternatively, there is software available that perform a scan while simultaneously writing the source sectors to an image.

I tried to clone the disk via norton but it does not succeed.
The ghost is stop all the time and can't continue.
What is the name of the software which you talking about?

ddrescue can perform multipass cloning. It clones the easy sectors on the first pass, and attempts the more difficult ones on subsequent passes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddrescue#R ... ants_of_dd
http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk

The following is a GNU ddrescue example from Wikipedia:

# first, grab most of the error-free areas in a hurry:

ddrescue -n /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log

# then try to recover as much of the dicey areas as possible:

ddrescue -r 1 /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log

Thanks for the informative and usefull answer!
Is that doftware free or cost money?

What in your opinion is better: ddrescue or GetMyDataBack?

P.s. The is ddrescue for windows?


Many Thanks!

ddrescue is a freeware Linux application. I can't remember if there is a Windows version. I know there is a Windows version of dd, but that app is best used for discs without bad sectors.

I sure hope these aren't customer drives you are playing with.

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

By my experience most of the defective Hard Drives come with bad sectors.
So this software is not good for the most cases..
For what case it's good for?




Nope
Friend's of mine. The Data is not important so I took it for practice.
In the worst case I won't be able to recover the data while there is a good chance that I will able to.

ddrescue know how to skip around bad patches in the media.

dd is a utility "whose primary purpose is the low-level copying and conversion of raw data".

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

You can use it to clone a disk for backup purposes.

You can use it to create an ISO disc image from a CD-ROM, or a disc image from a floppy diskette.

You can use it to write zeroes to your partition table.

Here is an example where dd was used to retrieve invisible partitions from an Akai MPC2000 audio sampler:
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/SCSI-drive ... td-p/37618

clone first then mess with the files as much as you like

if your working on the clients drive it can fail anytime soon.

i would use ddrescue