While you can always set the jumpers on a hard drive you want to recover and slave it in an exsisting system, it is much easier to use a USB enclosure to connect a hard drive to your system for testing/diagnosis. When hooking directly to the system, you risk the integrity of the connections and hardware inside the case. If you are looking for a better way – go pick up a USB enclosure from a local computer store (try to find a locally owned shop) and use that instead!

If you want to order online, here are some good prices:

The only thing you need to be concered with when buying is the connection type of your hard drive.  Generally they are either SATA or PATA (IDE). You need to buy the type that supports your type of hard drive.

PATA (IDE) is on the top, SATA is on the bottom.

Once you connect your disk, simply plug the USB cable into your computer to access (or attempt to access!) the data.

Hardware Data Recovery, enclosure, Hard Drives, Hardware, IDE, PATA, SATA, USB

Anyone who looks even briefly online for solutions to disk problems will inevitably come across some piece of advice like:

“Dude just toss it in the freezer for a couple of hours!! Worked for me!!”

Ok, first – we doubt it worked for you. We bet instead you read this advice somewhere and rehashed it to look like you knew what you were talking about. In reality, freezing your drive is NOT a good idea. You can create condensation (we all know hard drives like water) and can literally cause a head crash (when the read/write heads actually touch the spinning platters = no data for you).  Please, please..don’t put your disk in the freezer.

You can accomplish the same thing by cooling the drive. This is much easier on the parts of the disk and can be accomplished without moisture condensation. If you can keep the disk around 70 degrees, you are doing well.

The biggest problem we have with submitted disks is that the user has tried to hack their way through a recovery before they send the disk in. If you are unsure about your chances of recovering the data yourself, ask this simple question:

Is the data worth our reasonable fat fees? If the answer is yes – don’t mess with the drive anymore and send it in. If the answer is no – try cooling your drive to ensure your best possible chances of recovery – but definitely don’t freeze it!

Misconceptions Data Recovery, freezing hard drive, Hard Drives

There are hundreds if not thousands of different recovery softwares on the market. Which one is the best?

The fact is, most of them are the same basic functions with a different GUI. Going a step further, most of them are performing functions available for free in an open source piece of software. Why use open source instead of a software that costs money? Not only can you be sure exactly what an open source piece of software is doing, but it’s also free! As well, there is generally a good size community of users that are willing to discuss solutions and problems with the code.

Warning: Before moving forward with any self-recovery, please be aware you can easily make the disk COMPLETELY UNRECOVERABLE if you move forward without knowing what you are doing (and in some cases when you do). If the data is worth less than $199 to you feel free to try some of these suggestions. If the data is worth $199, don’t mess around with your chances. Power the drive down, pack it up and send it to us. Now without further annoying warnings, here is the best data recovery software available:

The Winner and Still Champion

Antonio Diaz’s GNU ddrescue. This software can copy a failing drive to a new disk – giving you a better chance of recovery because you will be working on a disk that is not failing. This is an important step and one of the first steps DriveFish takes when recovering data. Imagine you have a hard drive that is failing (you know it has bad blocks, is making noise, giving CRC errors etc). With ddrescue you can copy all of the data in RAW mode from the bad disk to a working one – which you can then work with to try and reconstruct your data. This way, you arent constantly spinning the bad drive and reducing your chances of recovery. Copy the disk using ddrescue to a working disk for your best chance of success!

It’s important to mention, ddrescue is very different from ddrescue and dd. ddrescue is authored by Antonio Diaz, is GNU and is more functional and safer than the other titles. In our experience we have never lost a single byte to a bug in ddrescue. To describe what this software does, we’ll use the description from the author:

“GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors. GNU ddrescue does not truncate the output file if not asked to. So, every time you run it on the same output file, it tries to fill in the gaps. The basic operation of GNU ddrescue is fully automatic. That is, you don’t have to wait for an error, stop the program, read the log, run it in reverse mode, etc. If you use the logfile feature of GNU ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point.”

One of the coolest things about this software is the logfile feature – allowing you to resume a failed copy and tweak down on troubled sectors.

You can find this wonderful software here.

How to use it?

Installation

Debian Linux:
# apt-get install ddrescue

RedHat Linux:
# yum -y install ddrescue

Installs as /usr/bin/ddrescue

Example:

To copy /dev/sda (damaged \device\harddisk0) to another drive /dev/sdb (empty \device\harddisk1)

# ddrescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb

To recover the partition data run fsck, for example if /home (user data) is on /dev/sda2, run fsck on partition /dev/sdb2:
# fsck /dev/sdb2

This avoids touching the damaged /dev/sda, if the procedure fails you can send the original disk to us.

Lastly mount the partition somewhere and see if you can access the data:
# mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/data

Honorable Mentions

Testdisk, Photorec and pdisk are all present in our engineers collections. Click the software titles to read more about them.

Data Recovery, Software Antonio Diaz, Copy, Data Recovery, dd, ddrescue, fsck, GNU, Hard Drives, Linux, open source, RAW, recovering data, self recovery

Welcome to the DriveFish Blog! Here you can find information about different recovery tactics, software, hardware, hard drives and more! Keep reading maybe you’ll learn something!

Uncategorized Data Recovery, drivefish, Hard Drives