Best method/tool for cloning a failing HDD for Data Recovery?

Layback Bear · 10 Oct 2015

I found this online. I hope it will help.

New Toshiba Satellite - can't boot from CD or USB [Solved] - Boot - Laptop Tech Support

No, when you set "Boot Speed" to "Fast" the system can boot only from the built-in HDD and only internal LCD and keyboard are supported during the boot process. I came across another BIOS setting that I thought would block booting from a USB or CD, but it didn't change my problem.

When booting I can select F8, and have the option to select an HDD, USB or CD/DVD, and when I select either USB or CD/DVD, it seems to check the media ("Media Check") and then "Fails" each time

jumanji · 10 Oct 2015

lc007 said:

...

Just to make sure the pen drive was created ok, I used it on a good computer and was able to get to the prompt root.

OK, what happens when you boot from SystemRescueCD on this good computer with your laptop HDD inside the enclosure plugged into it? Did you try it? Check and tell us.

Also check what Layback Bear suggested. Also if your Toshiba laptop is UEFI you have to set the BIOS to Legacy mode to disable secure boot.

theTechLord · 11 Oct 2015

lc007 said:

I stumbled upon this post and registered to ask if anything more can be done for my laptop hard drive.

My 3-year-old Toshiba laptop 640G hard drive crashed a week ago. It still shows up in BIOS with correct name and size but won't boot up to windows or anything else (safe mode, recovery, etc.) Using a Win7 repair disk also leads to an empty screen. I take the disk out, put it in a USB disk enclosure and plug in another computer. It doesn't show up in Windows Explorer or Disk Management. I downloaded "Test Disk" but it doesn't recognize this disk either.

Since the only place I can see it is in the original laptop under BOIS, I put it back in the slot. I tried to boot with BootMed live DVD, then after reading this post, SystemRescueCD flash drive. Both result in "PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable" error even though I changed the boot sequence to put DVD or USB ahead of HD in BIOS.

I already ordered another hard drive and will clean install Win7. Is there anything else I could try to recover files on the old drive?

Thanks for your help.

You want to recover files?
Are you able to boot from Hiren's Boot CD?

Connect another External Drive to the USB-Port of the Computer. The free space storage should be at least as much as all partitions together on the drive you want to recover are.

Run IsoBuster from Hiren's Boot CD. (It's 3.0, the newest version is 3.6. But 3.0 is also able to do that.)
Then open your Drive in IsoBuster, with the menu in the upper left corner, which displays the list of drives.
Select the option, which allows you to take Managed IBQ/IBP images.
Save the Image on your external drive.
Let IsoBuster run, until the Image is finished. ﴾IsoBuster 3.6 displays progress more accurate [xx,xx %]. The older versions still use xx%.﴿
If there are some errors, IsoBuster will ask you to complete an image. Read more about this here.
After you completed an image, there will maybe be some unreadable sections (or dead sections) on the drive, which are unreadable. I'm sorry to say, but they are not recoverable. Try it a few times and hope for good luck. I know, how bad it feels, to lose data.

IsoBuster is the best way, to rescue as much data as possible.
Moving data with Windows Explorer will be faulty. It will move some data, but with dead sections on a drive, Windows Explorer is highly confused. IsoBuster knows, how to treat drives with dead sections. Just try it! It's better than doing nothing. There is nothing that you can do wrong there.

lc007 · 11 Oct 2015

Layback Bear: my BIOS is set at Normal boot (instead of Fast) and my setup utility is InsydeH20 Rev 3.7, which doesn't have "disable secure boot" option anywhere. No UEFI or Legacy mode either. I searched Toshiba forums and someone mentioned that

try:
boot your lap with boot cd or live cd... if ram is not corrupted live cd or boot cd should work!!!
(cos live or boot cds uses spaces from ram)
if boot and or live cd is not working result could be RAM or mainboard. (never know what xactly striking off)
if boot cd and or live cd is working but hanging in the middle, result IS RAM (frm my experience)

Now I'm thinking on top of my hard drive, maybe my RAM is also damaged? My new hard drive will be here tomorrow. Time will tell if I can install Win7 from DVD/USB.

Jumanji: so far I tried this disk in USB enclosure on 3 good computers. None of them will recognize it. I can see the light blinking and disk spinning with occasional clicking noise but nothing else happened.

TechLord, I will give Hiren's Boot CD a try later on.

Thank you guys for your kind reply. This is truly a helpful and friendly forum. I will spend all effort to get Win7 up and running on the new hard drive in the next few days following the wonderful step-by-step tutorial on this site. Then I'll come back and continue to try data recovery on the old disk.

Thanks again.

theTechLord · 11 Oct 2015

[Hide]

lc007 said:

Layback Bear: my BIOS is set at Normal boot (instead of Fast) and my setup utility is InsydeH20 Rev 3.7, which doesn't have "disable secure boot" option anywhere. No UEFI or Legacy mode either. I searched Toshiba forums and someone mentioned that

try:
boot your lap with boot cd or live cd... if ram is not corrupted live cd or boot cd should work!!!
(cos live or boot cds uses spaces from ram)
if boot and or live cd is not working result could be RAM or mainboard. (never know what xactly striking off)
if boot cd and or live cd is working but hanging in the middle, result IS RAM (frm my experience)

Now I'm thinking on top of my hard drive, maybe my RAM is also damaged? My new hard drive will be here tomorrow. Time will tell if I can install Win7 from DVD/USB.

Jumanji: so far I tried this disk in USB enclosure on 3 good computers. None of them will recognize it. I can see the light blinking and disk spinning with occasional clicking noise but nothing else happened.

TechLord, I will give Hiren's Boot CD a try later on.

Thank you guys for your kind reply. This is truly a helpful and friendly forum. I will spend all effort to get Win7 up and running on the new hard drive in the next few days following the wonderful step-by-step tutorial on this site. Then I'll come back and continue to try data recovery on the old disk.

Thanks again.

[/HIDE]

Hello. Thanks for your Kind Reply, but please use quote/mention, otherways there is a risk, that the person, who you're replying to, does not see your post.
Here's a thread from another famous vBulletin-Based Forum: Please make use of the QUOTE/MENTION-Feature - XDA Forums

I hope, this helped :)

lc007 · 12 Oct 2015

Jumanji, I made progress but I'm afraid it's bad news for my drive.

1. According to some other posts here, I reset my BIOS with F9 then F10. Turn off computer, take out battery, hold power down for 30 sec.

2. I re-burned the key drive with the partition scheme set for "BIOS and UEFI". Last time I used UEFI. Plug in SystemRescueCD pen drive with the bad drive inside and boot (I didn't plug in external hard drive just to see if it could boot).

I don't know which of the above helped but I was able to boot into SystemRescueCD. It got hang up at a couple of places for so long that I thought it failed for sure. But eventually it arrived at root@sysresccd/root%.

Now I plugged in my 1TB external hard drive and did fdisk -l. The list is

disk/dev/loop0: 325 MiB, 340746240 bytes, 665520 sectors................................(is this what's remained of my hard drive?)

dev/sdb1 3.8G (pen drive)

dev/sdc1 128M
dev/sdc2 931.4G (external drive)

Please let me know what more I can do at this point. Thanks!

RolandJS · 12 Oct 2015

"...The point one should note here is that here we are interested in cloning a failing hard drive and not a conventional imaging software for backing up a normally working HDD or cloning to transfer the OS from a platter drive to SSD or another HDD..."

Amongst the top ten, here are four software-based data recovery programs: Steller Phoonix, R-Studio, Restorer Ultimate, MiniTool Power Data Recovery -- I have licenses for and have installed [on 3 computers] the last two mentioned.
If a failing HD spin-time is probably, possibly, potentially, measured in 2-3 hours, if not longer, then the only way I can see to go at this is: ASK lots of questions as to where most of the important data folders and files reside, based on the answers, attempt to rifle in, rather than shotgun around, and hopefully recover whatever can be recovered. If one believes a HD will last at least one full day -- go for a sector by sector clone or imaging, if not - go for an intelligent imaging.
I believe Steller and R-Studio boast about being able to work-around if not through bad sectors/clusters. I can't remember Restorer Uitimate or MiniTool being very effective on fast-failing hard-drives.
If folders and files are super critical, one probably has to ship drive to a bonifide data recovery place that specializes in hardware-level recovery -- make sure one brings thousands of dollars to the table for what may well be "un-recognizable" results.

** I kinda sorta speed-read through this very good topic!! I hope I didn't miss the point :) **

jumanji · 12 Oct 2015

Hi Ic007,

SystemRescueCD while booting will halt at two places waiting for your input .One is for keyboard selection and the other is I think network enable. If you do not enter any selection it will go by the default selection and continue after 20 seconds. To cut it short when it halts for your input just press enter to continue with the default selection.

Now your internal drive for whatever reason is shown as a loop device. That is a Linux term about which I do not have any idea and I hadn't encountered such a situation. Whatever your internal drive to be cloned is not shown properly.

At this point I would advice you to take out your internal drive ( It is 850GB if I remember correct), put it inside a working enclosure and plug it into your Toshiba laptop alongwith the 1TB external drive on which you want to clone. Now run SystemRescue CD.Give the command fdisk -l. Do your drives show up as sda, sdb and sdc.? Now tell me the capacities of sda, sdb and sdc to identify which is what. Then we will proceed to the next command. It will help if you take a camera shot and post it. Otherwise read the screen carefully and let me know the capacities.

sdowney717 · 17 Oct 2015

ddrescue mapfile and logfile location?

In curiosity I asked about said logfile for ddrescue. It is created in the directory from where the program is run.
There are no file names in the logfile, just sector information.
The file will be gone since it is a temporary boot of a linux OS as in you're booting a non persistent liveusb or just a livecd, so if you want it, copy before rebooting.

lc007 · 17 Oct 2015

jumanji and sdowney717, I spent the last few days doing clean install of Win7 on my new hard drive. Now it's up and running with all the updates and my programs. I'm reading up on system backup. Once I finish the backup, I'll come back tackling ddrescue. Thanks for the suggestions.