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| Thread ID: 128277 | 2012-12-10 04:02:00 | Accidental format of OS in Ubuntu | Curbd (13334) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 1317428 | 2013-01-11 11:08:00 | Good thinking Agent_24, do you have any software to recommend doing a 1:1 sector-by-sector backup with? Most drive cloning software can do this, since it is easy: it does not require any knowledge of the filesystem(s). Any half-decent software should have this feature. On a healthy drive you can use any software you like. However, If your data is on a faulty drive you need something more capable, and you need to minimise activity on the drive so you have the best chance of getting data off. I like to use GNU ddrescue (www.gnu.org) to make an initial backup image. It works just as well on healthy drives too. As for using CHKDSK. It's a common mistake people make. CHKDSK (and the older Scandisk) is not a data recovery program, nor is it really designed to work with faulty drives. While it does recover things in some cases (as happened luckily for you) and it can attempt to handle faulty drives in some way, its main function is to repair errors that prevent proper functioning of the filesystem. If that means deleting files it can do nothing else with, then that is what it will do. And if bad hardware gets in the way, you can end up with even more problems. The main point of data recovery is to NOT write to the drive! Make a 1:1 sector image (a partition-level image is useless because it only copies what it can see) and keep that as your master copy. Take a second copy of that first image, and perform all your recovery attempts on it. Then you can perform writes if needed. If you change something for the worse, just re-copy from the master image and try again. This works because if the drive you are recovering from is faulty, you may only get one chance to read off the data. If you do a bad write to your image and need to re-read it after the source drive has died, well... :xmouth: For any drive that is dead beyond software solutions, be prepared to pay big bucks. |
Agent_24 (57) | ||
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