Hello,

I am having troubles recovering files from a 1TB WD HDD, win NTFS, gone RAW. The first run of ddrescue took almost a week and showed amongst others, also the first sector to be bad, and now I feel like running out of luck and of solutions.

the first run with ddrescue:

ddrescue logfile and png of its viewer:
https://instaload.de/dl/564c5114c6a1e4.14388583
https://instaload.de/dl/564c50ddaf2642.63334684

? Should I run ddrescue again with r3 / three retries on bad sectors, hoping to get back the critical first sector?
? What are my chances according to the logfile?
? Which data recovery tool is most advisable to recover maximum files? photorec, dmde, recover my files, getdataback..?

I appreciate any help as I have been spending days researching and trying, without success...

THANKS!

the links you provided say "The selected file does not exist."
1. first sector can be reconstructed
2. you can try to run the /dev/sdd (the destination drive) against recovery software like r-studio Etc.

sorry for the broken links...

ddrescuelog.txt

ddrescuelogscreenshot.png

- I am currently working with dmde - is r-studio, or an other one, better?
- should I retry the first sector with ddrescue?

thank you for your reply.

here are the two files as attachments...

And you give any details on how to reconstruct the first bad sector..?

1. have you tried in reverse ?

2. maybe all your important files is already backed up

no, so far I just did a first run. and the destination hdd is not accessible, I just tried mini tool partition wizard, maybe it could restore the mbr, but without any success. it also showed the size of the 4TB HDD as 0.

4TB is the destination drive ?

with no hardware cloning in your disposal and assuming you won't send it over to a pro i would have tried sector sector in reverse

I have attached the output of smartctl -a; maybe it helps in guiding to the next move.

Could you specify which parameters you mean by sector sector in reverse?

Now just scan the clone with a program like R-Studio and recover your files to another drive.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

is there a way to replace the bad 1st sector and hence regain accessibility to the whole drive?

is it possible that a second run with ddrescue and 3 retries/bad cell wil improve the structure of the cloned drive?

I wanted to continue with DMDE - is r-rescue better?

thanks again!!!

-b 512 -R

Are you sure that the destination drive hasn't failed? What does smartctl say about it?

If the 4TB drive is OK, can you show us the partition structure with a disc editor, eg DMDE (freeware):

http://dmde.com/download.html

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

I have started DMDE on the cloned drive around 5 hours ago, and it is currently at 0,5% with around 2000 jpegs found.
It seems that yes, the new image was successfully made.
And that the just the search will take more than one month.
Uff.
With a second run with ddrescue and another search process with dmde, maybe another go with another rescue programme, I might be occupied with this well into next summer... ???

any tips to speed it up, any shortcuts could save me effectively lifetime!

The search is proceeding at around 1 MB/s. Is the clone connected to a SATA port or is it connected via USB?

BTW, you can stop DMDE's search at any time and resume later. The search results can be logged to a file. After you stop the search, you can examine any of the NTFS fragments.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

patient's drive with slow responding ?

i think it would have taken a lot longer than a week to clone

oops sorry
i thought by mentioning "(both)" you meant the "patient" AND the cloned

well, there's even more to consider..

the destination HDD, not the patient is a new intenso drive, but my system at hand is quite slow - a thinkpad x200 with USB2 - seems still slow enough..

is it possible to pause the DMDE process and try to get back the data it found so far...?

what other possibilities do I have to speed up the prcess, besides getting new hardware?

You can use the Start/Stop button to pause and resume a scan. The Save and Load buttons allow you to save the current scan and restore a previous scan.

After pausing the search, you can select any found NTFS structure and Open Volume. This will enable you to access any files/folders that pertain to that NTFS fragment.

It would be helpful for us to see DMDE's Partitions window. If sector 0 is the only damaged sector at the beginning of the drive, then DMDE should still see the NTFS volume without a search. Repairing sector 0 would then require only a couple of mouse clicks.

One other thing that the Partitions window will show is whether your external drive is using 4KB sectoring, in which case you would have cloned a 512e drive to a 4Kn drive. I'm not sure how that would look to a data recovery program.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

thank you for getting back to me - I have attached a picture of the DMDE partitions window, somehow the windows screenshot function didn't work here.

after scanning around 1% of the partition, dmde found ~4000 jpeg files, of which about the half had 0kb. I could recover a sample of the other jpegs could successfully.

- how would you judge the cloned disk based on the attached screenshot?
- I need to get back the structure of the disk, is it possible in any way?

Again, your help is very much appreciated.

another question - on DMDE's partitions search, some parameters can be set, including RAW EXT OR NTFS. so far, all that DMDE found belonged to RAW.

-> to speed up search, is it wise to limit it just to RAW?