Hard Drive Recovery Software?

jorgewang046

New member
Hello all,

Last week my wife's Hard Drive died. She had Windows Vista on it and the partition that it is on is now corrupt. I've bought a new hard drive and installed ubuntu on it. I'm trying to recovery data off the old hard drive. Does anyone know a hard drive recovery software? ? I've found a software call CloudBacko, but I have no experience with that. I'm open to all suggestions that might help recover data.

Thank you in advance!
 
Once I accidentally deleted (mission critical) data off our Job Data share on our Prinergy server because I didn't pay close enough attention to which server window I was working in. I knew that day would come eventually. Recuva totally bailed me out. Because I acted immediately, it recovered *most* of the files I accidentally deleted. Some didn't make it but recovered most of it. Very user friendly interface but just not sure if they have a Linux build. Good luck.

https://www.piriform.com/recuva
 
The service you posted a link to appears to be a backup solution - not what you need at this point. That would help you if everything on the disk were previously backed up using that service.

If you have any linux/unix experience or have some patience and willingness to learn, I would suggest using a linux live disk and the command ddrescue. I believe it comes with the Opensuse live disk, and probably many other distributions. A live disk allows you to completely boot up an operating system from a CD, DVD or USB, without anything having to be installed on a hard drive (useful for troubleshooting and fixing things).

There is a difference between corrupt data and failing media (i.e., the hard drive). When the media is failing, you need to get as much of the data off as quickly as possible with as little stress to the device as possible. Once you have copied as much as you can to reliable media, you can then worry about dealing with corrupt data. In typical usage, the command ddrescue will copy one hard drive to another, skipping over sections that return read errors, then return to try harder on the problematic sections only after finishing copying the sections that are easily read. This can make a big difference in how much usable data is recovered, since you won't kill the hard drive trying in vain to copy the first section of unreadable sectors.

I believe there are several tutorials for the process that you can find with google. You would need a reliable hard drive with the same or greater capacity as the failing hard drive to clone to. I suggest having no other hard drives connected to the computer when cloning to eliminate confusion and mistakes. You would want to make absolutely sure that when you run the command you do not have the two devices (hard drives) reversed, otherwise you would copy the new hard drive to the old, effectively erasing it. Once the initial copying of easily readable sectors is finished, it may take a ridiculous amount of time to read whatever usable data may exist in the more problematic sections. Many people likely just stop the process there since you don't get much return from that point.

It is possible, but less likely, that the hard drive itself is fine, and you just have some data corruption in the file system. If that were true, you'd probably still want to copy off the data so you could run Microsoft's chkdsk to try and fix it without having to worry about chkdsk screwing it up even more. A program called smartctl comes with most linux live disks, and it can tell you if the hard drive itself has problems (reallocated sector count is the biggest clue).
 
The service you posted a link to appears to be a backup solution - not what you need at this point. That would help you if everything on the disk were previously backed up using that service.

Recuva is not a backup solution and is made to recover from catastrophic failures such as this so theres no need for a previous backup. Have a look: https://www.piriform.com/recuva/features/recovery-from-damaged-or-formatted-disks

I looked further and it looks like it's exclusively for Windows. It may be worth a shot see if it will run via Wine. Like I said, the interface is very user friendly. How to Install Windows Programs in Ubuntu (with Step-by-Step Screenshots)
 
gig0:

I agree that Recuva appears to deal with data corruption. My post was referring to the CloudBacko service the OP mentioned. Sorry I didn't make that more clear.

If the problem is only data corruption (e.g., the power went out at exactly the wrong moment, and the file system ended up with an inconsistency that Windows can't deal with, but the hard drive itself is healthy), then using data recovery software directly on that drive would probably make sense. However, if the source of the problem is failing media, it is very important to first copy all readable data off of the hard drive, then worry about the corrupt data in that copy later. The last thing you would want to do is perform a full read pass on the damaged disk, not to copy anything, but only to build an index of recoverable files. The hard drive may well survive that initial full pass, but fail when you attempt to actually recover files.
 
whoops! Sorry, I misunderstood. I wasn't familiar with Cloudbacko software he mentioned.
 

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