Now that I had my hard disk fried and I hadn’t backed up data (some of it important) from it in some months, I had to recover data from it at any cost.
And for that all I needed was a Linux live OS that could either run off the CD drive or a usb with DDrescue, TestDisk and Photorec.
Knoppix was one of the earliest live CDs I had used and had them all. But, I decided to use Ubuntu rescue remix which had a nice set of software for rescuing dead or dying hard disks. I guess you can also recover the latest version of Ubuntu, boot from it and have access to (or download and install) all these recovery software.
While TestDisk could rebuild or recover boot sector on either FAT 32 / NTFS apart from un-deleting files, it didn’t work on my damaged hard disk.
So, I decided to use DDrescue, which blindly copies data from one file or block device to another, trying to rescue the good parts first in case of read errors. All I had to do was attached an external hard disk with sufficient free disk space (atleast as much as the failed disk from which I was recovering the files), mount it and run DDrescue with 3 retry passes (which wasn’t necessary as most of the disk was recovered in one pass).
DDrescue ran for a full week and rescued almost 70% of the data on the hard disk. I had to Ctrl-C and abort it as it was doing another pass but wasn’t getting any data.
Once the old hard disk partition recover was done to my satisfaction, I mounted it like a regular partition and copied back files to a new hard disk.
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I am deliberately not going into more details on the rescuing process. You can read more about data recovery (including use of DDrescue) on ubuntu website and use of TestDisk and Photorec on CGSecurity’s website.I would highly recommend going thru those website and knowing more about these fabulous tools to recover data.
