Searching for files and recovering if possible

[jdoherty76]

HI folks forgive me if this is a stupid question, being new to forum it'll take me a little time to find my way around. I had a catastrophic disk error and was given great help in another sub forum here. The issue I have is that it appears that my harddisk has been wiped, boot sector, partition table etc is knackered. The suggestion was to perform a sector by sector clone of the disk. I have downloaded Macruim from here and have a spare drive with sufficient capacity.

Question 1:

Would this be a disk cloning operation I am after as oppossed to a disk image operation?

When I have my sector by sector dump I want to be able to run some recovery programs against the dump to see if I can extract personal information. I realise I may not get anything but maybe I'll get something. The drive has certainly not been reformatted.

Question 2:

Can you please recommend some tools that'll be able to trawl this dump and attempt to recover lost/deleted files?

As always I'm relying on you guru's out there to hopefully guide me in the correct direction.

Thank you in advance JD

 

[Mark Phelps]

I've used a couple of different data recovery apps with success -- both from the same company: GetDataBack for NTFS, and RecoverMyFiles. You can download, install, and try out each of these for free -- but to recover the files, you have to go online and buy a license.

There is also "recuva" -- which is free, but I have not tried it.

 

[jdoherty76]

Thanks Mark appreciated I'll have a look at these. In the meantime would you happen to know if the process I run is a full disk clone as opposed to a disk image?

 

[Mark Phelps]

A "cloning" operation requires both disks to be connected and basically duplicates the contents of the first disk on the second. This is a sector-by-sector function that is slow but does result in a true duplicate.

An "imaging" operation creates a copy of the used portion of the original disk and stores that to one or more files. To migrate that to a second disk, you have to do a "restore" operation. This uses data compression and is generally much faster than the cloning operation (at least, in my experience).

 

[jdoherty76]

Thank you greatly appreciated...