Hello.

I am trying to help a friend do data recovery on his old HD. He is looking to recover pictures of his daughter growing up for her upcoming wedding.

Maybe from being moved around or other storage issues, something appears to be wrong with the drive. Windows isn't able to give normal access to it.

So, I started an .img clone of it with HDD Raw Copy Tool 1.10. Hoping that once I complete the clone, I can then run data recovery (Recuva?) on the img and get some/most of the images my friend is looking for.

However, the cloning is going very slow (3.5-5 MB/s). So, this could take days to complete. And HDD Raw Copy is showing CRC errors every 10-30 minutes.

I'm wondering if these errors are static problems on the disk. Or, is there something else wrong with the drive that is sporadically failing and throwing the error?

The concern being that stressing the drive out with a multi-day clone could cause it to die completely.

I'm hoping that more experienced data recovery experts here can give me some advice on best steps I can take at this point?

Thank you for any help you can offer.

Use HDDSuperClone (or OpenSuperClone) instead. It incorporates a firmware hack which will stabilise your drive.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thank you!

I restarted the clone using HDDSuperClone based on more reading here.

One question, HDDSuperClone allows the user to write the target file as anything they want (ie. no file extension is added). Is the resulting file a .img format? Or, something else?

The resultant file is a byte-for-byte image, just like dd.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Ok. Thank you.

So ".dd"?

I am just wanting to make sure I understand that so I can pick the right application (that is able to read that file type) to use to pull media out once it's created.

Most applications should recognise .img as an image file type. It really doesn't matter what extension you choose, anyway.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.