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

ddrescue1111 said:

jumanji said:

I just had a quick run-through with Trinity Rescue kit. It will perhaps be too much for a non-Linux user. That is my first impression.

So then, I have come to the best way to clone a failing HDD sector by sector atleast for now :))

Tool: ddrescue Source: SystemRescueCD

1. Download the SystemRescueCD from Download - SystemRescueCd systemrescuecd-x86-4.2.0.iso 380MB and create a bootable pendrive with that ISO using Rufus Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way

2. Boot your computer with that pen drive with your source disk (your failing disk) and a destination disk (formatted empty disk of capacity not less than that of your source disk) plugged in.

3.Against the command prompt type: fdisk -l [ENTER] This will list all your drives. Note the nomenclature of your source disk and destination disk.

4. Next against the command prompt type: ddrescue -r3 -n -S -v /dev/sdb /dev/sdc recovery.log [ENTER]

Note: Replace sdb and sdc with the correct device nomenclature of Source disk and Destination disk as obtained in step 3.

5. Sit back and relax. The cloning process may take days depending upon how bad your Source disk is. If your data is important patience is the key and the wait worth it. The saving grace is you can stop the process any time with Ctrl -C and then restart. It will take the cue from the log file and start from where it left.

In the cloning process itself it will go through cloning all the good sectors first and then try to recover the bad sectors one by one trying it 3 times (r3 option) before giving up on it.

I have actually tried it cloning an 8GB pen drive with bootable Peppermint Linux ( that was created sometime back on a request from Golden to try it and report ) onto a 32GB freshly formatted pen drive. It took about half an hour. At the end of the cloning I was able to boot into Peppermint from that cloned drive which signified successful sector by sector cloning including the boot sector/s.

May be Anshad Edavana will be able to polish it and improve upon it as one who had actually tried it on a failing disk. ( As indicated already I had no failing disk.)

Hey guys,

So, Im going to take a shot at this and had some questions:

1. is this still the best set of instructions, and command to use?

2. am i able to boot from the external hard drive that i make this image to, or some change needs to occur before i do that? (i.e. linux filesystem to windows filesystem conversion, or some other requirement)

3. after i make this image (assuming it completes), what exactly am i going to do with R-studio to recover the bad sectors?

4. do i need to format the external harddrive in a certain way/format before i begin this?

5. I would like to do this from a failing SSHD (hybrid), to a external HDD using a USB cable. Is it still the same set of instructions?

6. A little off topic but, if i leave the bad drive installed for now, in UEFI can i stop it from getting mounted on boot?

7. Another Off topic question, before the failing SSHD diagnostics i copied over a 60GB directory from a an old PC. within that directory there were various subdirectories not showing correct file names/paths. could this large/old directory somehow have caused or resulted from the SSHD to go bad?

Thanks!

Is ddrescue not the best way to go about this anymore?

There is an awesome, free program from HDDGuru.com called HDD Raw Copy Tool. It runs from within Windows and will do a sector by sector copy, automatically skipping bad sectors. I have found it useful when a source disk is too badly corrupted for most conventional cloning programs to handle. This program also allows you to backup a whole drive or partition and restore from the image.

Hi mates, thank you a lot for such precious topic.
I would recoend anyone to *never* connect a highly daaged disk under Windows, this OS is pretty invasive and try to stress the HDD if it fails to read. I also have big suspect that it tris to write something on MFT as default behaviour, even if the disk painfully answer.. it couldn't be worst than this, but we know.. they will probably never care about it.
So all the utilities to recover under Windows could be pretty welcomed in case of softw corruption or deleted files/format, but only if the disk is healthy. For bad sectors avoid it.

I also agree that making a ISO would be the best solution, later there are softwares able to extract files from it, without worries that defective HDD getting worst and worst by time. I like GetDataBack.

QUESTION/HELP: (THANKS!)
I'm quite disoriented about the string to use with ddrescue, here I read different examples, and I dubt about the parameters to use. For example:
ddrescue -f -n /dev/hda /dev/hdb mapfile
ddrescue -d -f -r3 /dev/hda /dev/hdb mapfile
ddrescue -r3 /dev/hda2 /dev/hdb2 logfile

I need to produce an ISO file, readable by GetDataBack. I'd like also to have a log file and save it to the destination drive. 3 retries are good, what parameters should I use?

Kindly write me what lines to write, first I should know how the disk are mounted, then the ddrescue line.
SystermRescueCD is at version 4.9.2, I'll use that

Since unfortunately nobody helped here I got myself a chance.

Starting from SystermRescueCD 4.9.2 I typed following commands:
ntfs-3g /dev/sdc1 /mnt/windows/ (I mounted r/w the target hard drive)
ddrescue -d -n -f -r3 -y /dev/sdd /mnt/windows/iso.iso mapfile

The mapfile is written to the destination drive, because, I suppose, at propt I've selected /mnt/windows# instead of root#. This is better then have it in RAM disk, stored even if something can be wrong.

I discarded -n parameter (I'm not sure I did right) since I let the ddrescue analyze deeply the bad areas. I added -y cause I saw natevely program stores an amout of data (about 200MB) on RAM before writing them, during this period somehow the defective disk started "retrying" before reading again, making the rescue longer; with -y it writes what it reads, it goes slower (around 6MB/sec instead 25) but goes consecutively till the next bad area.
Anyway I noticed it stops after some MB, maybe the disk is recursively bad after some MB but it looks very strange, probably the software isn't much perfect.. or it's a problem of the USB SATA adapter, or it's a problem of overtemperature of defective HDD.. anyway I'm still scanning surface, I'll let you know

@jumanji @Anshad Edavana
Have to post my success story. @essenbe pointed me to this thread.

Failing Samsung laptop drive (spinner) on a Dell N5010; 4% health, abundant read errors. Evidently DropBox had been installed and 176Gb of data downloaded several months ago (leaving 55GB free on a 320GB drive). Unbeknownst to the owner, DropBox had been thrashing the drive constantly for months. When the owner rang me, it was because the computer had gotten so slow, nothing could be done on it. I identified the DropBox issue, we uninstalled the program and deleted the 176GB of files from it. I checked the HDD health, and it was fine. The next day, upon booting, a Samsung window appeared on the desktop saying the hard drive was bad. I instructed him to shutdown, and collected the system the following day.

Crystal Disk Info showed read errors off the charts. Offline Macrium would image the drive, but with errors, and the 2 images I made could not be mounted to be read. So, in a last ditch effort to save precious photos, and years of family history research, I came to this thread, read it in its entirety and tried ddrescue.

I grabbed an extra rig, disconnected its internal HDD and connected the 320GB failing laptop drive in its place. Then I created the SystemRescueCD flash drive using Rufus and booted the system to it. Once it was ready I plugged in an empty 2TB USB external expansion drive, ran fdisk -l and identified my source/target. The recovery command I used was this:

Code:

ddrescue -d -f -r3 -n -v /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb recovery.log

(sda3 was the source Windows OS partition where all the personal files would be found.)

After seven hours, the program completed at 99% success.

I then took the external hard drive (target), hooked it up to my main rig and ran it through a paid edition of MiniTool Power Data Recovery. Pointing it to the user folder, I was able to recover just over 16GB of data, which I believe is just about what he had on there. After saving the recovered files to my rig, I opened a few pictures, documents, text files and a music file - all worked!

I am now in the process of copying all his precious data back over to his laptop, on which I have installed a new SSD and a fresh copy of W10.

THANK YOU for this thread! It is a life saver! And thanks to @essenbe for helping me through the steps. I am a Windows user, and have had only minimal experience with Linux in general, but this thread made it relatively painless for me to accomplish the task. You guys ROCK!

jumanji said:

^ A good workout. . Keep up the good work....

Thank you, jumanji. I thought that the thread was useful to me, so the least I could do to express my gratitude was to enrich it with another successful story as well as covering the key moments I faced with whilst learning the procedure.

jumanji said:

... I have almost forgotten whatever I did and wrote - can't retain anything in memory . Time to go :)...

I am familiar with it ;D

Knowing I might have to redo the research in far future, I thought it would be also a good step to make today.

The majority will look for this information once in 5 or 10 (or more) years. So the probability that we would forget about nuances and steps we had done before - is very high, unless if saved somewhere and often seen. So this information is not the type we would often return to. (exclusion: unless one's job is related to it, or there are enthusiasts who would help others, and etc.)

In fact, there was a time I made a thread, received replies and forgot about it. Three years later, I found that same thread.... You probably know what happened next...

At first, I failed to recognise my own writing until I reached its ending, only then I was shocked. Before I realised who was the author, I already had an impression about him. This was some funny experience as I was able to learn something new.

So should I happen to forget about this thread too... x)

jumanji said:

... In any case this discussion was only a starter and I am glad it is getting embellished by users like you sharing their work done and knowledge gathered...

Thank you for starting up this thread jumanji.
It was the thread I began my research from and referred to during the process of recovery, and it was without a doubt - useful.
At the same time, I must say that this resource - was also helpful, can't go unnoticed (Thanks SilverLeaf!).

---

Below, a few extra thoughts I've been having, however, none needs to agree or disagree with them:

1) Consider the case: important information is mixed up with other data and that makes it up to 1TB or 1.5TB. The external drive starts to work poorly due to some physical damage and let's say, ended up being inaccessible. Surely one would need 2 TB drive to handle this monster (unless there are other ways to handle this situation that I am unaware of). Depending on the severity of damage, the time needed to process the recovery will vary.

So it kinda dictating the following: keep important data on a smaller available device, so that in case something goes wrong, the recovery procedure wouldn't take ages.

2) important data is safer when one's having a few copies of it on different devices locally (that goes undoubtedly correct).

3) avoid backing up important data online - because this is most likely not in physical reach for you and despite the law, statements, services provided by people in charge there, one never knows what can go wrong on their side (people disobeying the law, hackers, information leak, etc.). Statements do not always ensure the protection, though at the same time, chances that something like this would happen are also low.

You guys are so right.

I'd completely forgotten the steps and need to review once more as there is yet again a need to do so.

Some twists:
Failing drive sometimes shows up in Disk Mgt and sometimes doesn't.
Failing drive sometimes shows up in "fdisk -l" command when booting machine with ddrescue
Failing drive is a DISH network external HDD that wife wants me to try and rescue as it has some shows not available online/netflix etc.
Failing drive seems to Linux

Had a old working drive same size 2TB and wanted to see if I can rescue the failing HDD. But "fdisk -l" command shows the following:

Failing HDD - 2,000,398,933,504 bytes
Good HDD - 2,000,396,746,752 bytes

Failing HDD - 3,907,029,167 sectors
Good HDD - 3,907,024,896 sectors

So, normally it would seem that Good HDD cannot be used to rescue as it has less bytes/sectors than Failing HDD even though the size of both as sold is 2TB.

What would happen if I still try to go ahead? At the most, would I lose some data? Or will the whole process crap out?

Thanks,