I have a wd 5000 laptop hdd with heaps of bad sectors and i cant image it directly from windows as it trys to mount the hdd and locks up for long periods of time.

i have tried to adjust the time out in hklm\system\current controlset\services\disk to 10 seconds to help but it still all efforts are futile.

Is it safe to re write the partition flag so it wont mount or how do i do this?

I have ubuntu on a pc and could use ddrestore but i lack dial up drivers to search the net to install the gnuddrestore apt online with out the pc working.

this program would be gread as i can do multople passes on the drive setting deeper levels of interegration and appending it to the original image.

what would be the correct method to go about recovering the files ignoring dammaged areas?

wdtler wont function on the drive either to stop the drive from preforming retrys also. is there a way to enable this on a desktop drive?

linux gddrescue

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data recovery Poland

sorry that is what i mean but i dont have a way to install from repo because linux does not support dialup and winmodems very well.

is there a windows equalivant of gddrescue or a way to get a linux binary on to the system with out messing with source code ?

im not really that savy in linux.

if i load up mhdd and disable the mbr with 55aa i think it is all the clone tools either dont work or are really slow from hirens boot cd.

i was hoping for a raw windows clone tool that will ignore io errors and bad sectors.

from linux i can disable bad block mapping with hdparm -D is there a windows tool to do this ?

hi jonny,

You could maybe download and burn a linux Live-CD, run ddrescue from that and image/recover to a spare drive.

It would be worth making sure the only disks connected to the PC are the bad source drive and a known good empty target drive.

K

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Когда хочется кушать – съешь всё.
Голод не тётка!

I found the ubuntu rescue remix cd on the net and it seems to have everything I need included and im now part way through a dump now.

My motherboard has buggy acpi inteface and I had to rework the image a bit and play with some bios settings with some info from the net and it now all works.

After I dump the image and mount it to recover files i need to use some sort of repair and recovery tools, I see rstudio is mentioned on the forum a lot is it best to stick with that ?

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Hi prof,

yes R-Studio is good.
Also check out "Find and Mount", this could also get you up and running without the expense of a full DR program such as GetDataBack / R-Studio and the like.

In Demo mode, ie Free, R-Studio will let you see whats on there.
Then you may need to decide if it's worth buying the program to recover your data, or going the "free" route.

If the file table has survived then it should be good to go.

If not then you may need to resort to R-studio and the like for carving files by header, or another useful util is PhotoRec (part of testdisk cgsecurity software by Christophe Grenier)

Maybe donate someone the price of a beer if you can't afford retail products. (Beer Karma =) )

Essentially you pay for convenience. Most things can be done for free but need a bit more time, experience or skill.

gl

Kern

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Когда хочется кушать – съешь всё.
Голод не тётка!

I have had a look at both and I might go with the purchase it is worth the peace of mind that I have it in the future if needed.

So it is still dumping now and the average speed is 600kb per second it has been going for 4 days straight and it is 40% done I have set it up on a spare pc but I set the block skip size to abrox 50 mb to stop capturing so many bad sectors as it was really crawling.

It has verified 600 bad blocks with the 50 mb skip and I will need to do a second pass then possibly more it looks like it is going to take a month to do properly!!!

will a comercial solution be faster ?

Also is there a way to enable time limited error recovery and disable bad block mapping to hopefully speed up the process? I guess for this would need to peek and poke via ttl (I have all this hardware as I'm an electronics engineer)?

I noticed the option on ddrescue was removed that drops the infile on read errors to stop it going slow after a bad block I have this problem so I made a script to stop and rerun ddrecover every 20 min, I'm guessing the kernel cant be patched to force the cache to stay enabled ?

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