External hard disk unaccessible

All the files found must be those in the good sectors. I hope you have copied those to another drive. If not do it now.

But I have this question. Why did you run check disk? Were you not able to see the good files without running check disk? Running check disk rearranges the file data most probably into different sectors and therefore the ddrescue log is no longer valid.

So may be you have delete that logfile and start ddrescue afresh and clone afresh. If it crashes again without completing the first pass then may be you have to take it as files in bad sectors beyond recovery. (And be content with whatever you got. :))

But before doing this second run afresh, after copying all data in the cloned drive, run this check disk command and check whether you can get some more files intact.

CHKDSK K: /f /v /r /x Press enter. Note: Replace K: with the actual drive letter of the cloned drive

Nope no more files.I had to run chkdsk because when i tried to open it gave me error "disk is not accessible" and when i plugged it in scan options automatically came up and there was no option to continue without scanning as there usually is.
Next time should i use testdisk to recover files before chkdsk? and what do you think is the problem with the old drive?Hardware?.

It is definitely a hardware problem - bad sectors.

Using Test Disk after cloning was the original plan, assuming the cloning completes all three passes and the
cloned drive was still not accessible as in the normally encountered cases where the drive appears in Windows Disk Management but with various anamolies like RAW, not initialised , etc., which Windows cannot correct.

If however, Windows finds the anamolies and offers to correct, then let it.

Thanks i was able to recover most of my data

dragonballz4 said:

Thanks i was able to recover most of my data

Hello,

I was in a similar boat last week per following post:
Best method/tool for cloning a failing HDD for Data Recovery?

I used bootable flash drive to boot and run ddrescue. The command that I ran was:
ddrescue -r3 -n -v /dev/[Source disk]/dev/[Destination disk] recovery.log

The process finished successfully but I do NOT see recovery log in the flash drive and was wondering if you had an idea based on the research that you might have done on this.

Thanks,

Well i actually specified where the log should be stored but if you don't do it, it is automatically saved in your destination drive. It should be on your destination flash drive. And i think there is a difference between recovery.log and recovery.logfile

dragonballz4 said:

Well i actually specified where the log should be stored but if you don't do it, it is automatically saved in your destination drive. It should be on your destination flash drive. And i think there is a difference between recovery.log and recovery.logfile

Should have specified that Source/Destination disks were Failing HDD/Replacement HDD respectively.

ddrescue was run from the bootable flash drive.