External hard disk unaccessible

Hi, my toshiba 1tb external drive has become unaccessible after working fine till yesterday. When i plug in the drive the green bar ontop keeping forward and if i click on drive Explorer hangs. It also doesn't disply detail in my computer like free space. On previous threads you have asked for picture of disk management, i cant post it as it becomes unresponsive as soon as i plug in the drive. After searching for a while i am using photorec to recover files but it going slowly. Should i use ddrescue or clonezilla? Any other software?please any help would be appreciated. It is important that i recover my files.

Thanks fof the reply will check and tell you in some time. A question-can puppy linux run ddrescue or i need knoppix for that?

Download lupu-528.005.iso (132.6 MB) from http://puppylinux.org/main/Long-Term-Supported%20Puppy.htm#lucidpuppy

Create your bootable Lucid Puppy pendrive with this ISO using Rufus 2.2 (808KB) https://rufus.akeo.ie/ (All data on the pendrive will be lost when rufus formats the pendrive before writing the ISO and so backup any data on the pendrive elsewhere before running Rufus)

Boot your PC with this pendrive using the onetime boot menu Check whether that faulty drive is shown and you can access it and see your data. If seen copy all data to the empty drive.( You must have plugged in the empty drive before booting into Lucid Puppy)

Guide on how to use Lucid Puppy :Go to the topic Recovering files from the non-bootable Internal Drive: in my thread
https://www.sevenforums.com/software/198909-lucid-puppy-way-recover-files-non-bootable-computer.html

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

I created a lucid puppy cd and when i connected the drive it was read only-"ntfs bitmap error. Inconsistency or hardware fault.run checkdsk."
So i was able to virw the files{2hrs to scan} but could not copy. I am currently using pupp universal dd to copy the drive as i think its the hardware failing. Should i do something else or continue with this?

No idea what pupp universal dd is.

If you want to clone the drive I would recommend ddrescue in SystemRescuecd Download - SystemRescueCd
You may also read the QuickStart Guide and also complete documentation in that webpage.

ddrescue: https://www.sevenforums.com/general-d...ml#post2780161

Ok ill be able to download rescue cd till tomorrow.pupp universal dd is i think similar to ddrescue you can copy whole drive or partition. Ignoring read errors.
In your experience what are my chances of recovering the data?

Can't say anything about data recovery.There is no one size fits all here. You have to try everything possible.

But if you suspect that the HDD is failing, then cloning the drive ASAP and running data recovery on the cloned drive will be the best option and in that ddrescue excels since it makes repeated attempts to read the bad sectors trying to get the data out of it. In your case you may require a >1TB drive.

If cloning is successful, you may then try running TestDisk to check whether it can repair any file system corruption like bad NTFS boot sector or MFT and list the files.

mjf said:

...... I'm not sure how cloning deals with bad sectors....

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Ddrescue

The strategy is to read and copy as much data as possible in the first round, since every access to the storage device could be the last one before it totally fails. Then try to copy the data off the failed/failing areas of the drive.

ddrescue can use direct disk access and ignore the kernel’s cache.

First round, copy every block without read error and log the errors to /root/rescue.log

Second round, copy only the bad blocks and try 3 times ( or as many as you may want ) to read from the source before giving up.

Now the new drive could be mounted and the file system checked for corruption.

Software that is used for System Image backup like Macrium Reflect cannot do all these or most of these :). By trying these you will be taking a potential risk "since every access to the storage device could be the last one before it totally fails"