Possible data recovery

Hey guys, so I've got one of those nasty seagate 3tb drives. You know, the ones that die? Well, it's died. Kinda. It had a few read errors on it but did fine for a few months and then started choking. I didn't have anything to move the data to so now it's in a bit of a bad state. In fact, it's pretty difficult to get it to detect on start up.

Now, it seems like there is a bad sector in either the MBR or the partition table. If the system attempts to boot from the drive (there was never an OS installed), it will hit TLER and attempt to read something. You can't hear the drive, but if you feel it there is a faint "bum-bum" sensation about once a second of the heads moving around. If this happens on boot, it's impossible to get the drive to detect since it will essentially hang for a minute and a half or so and the BIOS will give up on it, but if I go straight to a USB and get it to ignore the drive, then it'll show up as a physical drive in linux. I believe when gparted attempts to read partitions it causes the same TLER error, but I didn't feel the drive last time I tried. It did give out data errors on reading /dev/sda and /dev/sda1, I'm not sure if reading for a sda1 is default or if it did grab that there was a partition there. Gparted obviously can't get anything substantial from it either way.

Now, the thing I can think that would explain what is wrong and possibly allow me to recover data is if the MBR and partition tables are bad but the data is still there, so in theory I need something that will read the raw data from the drive and piece this back together into actual data, and also play well with the 90 second TLER if and when it hits it. I suspect there are bad sectors in the drive that aren't in the MBR/Partition table and it's gonna hit those at one point or another.

What's the best way to go about trying to recover data from this, if it's recoverable at all? The only program I know about that can do stuff like this would be ddrescue, and I'm not that well versed in it.

Clonezilla can be configured to ignore drive errors and try to copy data no matter what. However, if the drive isn't responding, the backup might take too long to be useful.

thideras said:

Clonezilla can be configured to ignore drive errors and try to copy data no matter what. However, if the drive isn't responding, the backup might take too long to be useful.

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I've got a separate computer for this and I don't mind if it takes a few days to nab the data off of it, as long as I'm not missing data because it's trying to read possibly good sectors when it's still doing it's TLER stuff from the bad one.

Also, how do I need to set up my destination drive for this?

It has been years since I've had to do recovery with Clonezilla, so you will probably want to check online. You could do an exact clone if you had a 3tb drive, or you can save them as files on a formatted drive.

Tried clonezilla but it was having none of it. Just now got (g)ddrescue to run.

The drive doesn't like to detect when it's warm, I've got some bags and a shallow bin of cold water on standby if it decides it's not gonna read while warm either. It's dangerous, but it beats the heck out of sticking it in the freezer overnight.

With any luck I'll be working on grabbing files from this big puddle of bits by this time tomorrow.

Alright. Good news. ddrescue got basically everything off of the drive (errsize:32xxxKB) and when I mounted the .img it more or less came right up. Problem is now I've got a 3tb image file taking up space on this 5tb external. How should I go about moving the data outside of the image file? Is there a way to shrink it as I go?

An image is going to be the size of the source drive, so no, not really. I'd go through the data to see if there is anything you can delete, and move out as much as you can. You might have to split it among a few drives, depending on how much space you have free.

Start over using r-studio. You need to do it from within a working windows session. As long as the board can see the drive, rstudio can get the data as data, dumping it to the folder of your choice on a dif disc. I deleted all my 200+gb's of wallpaper by accident once but got it all back. Just make sure you only do one recovery per backup session as it will dup everything.

habbajabba said:

Start over using r-studio. You need to do it from within a working windows session. As long as the board can see the drive, rstudio can get the data as data, dumping it to the folder of your choice on a dif disc. I deleted all my 200+gb's of wallpaper by accident once but got it all back. Just make sure you only do one recovery per backup session as it will dup everything.

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I've already got the whole disk on image, I'm not about to do another 30 hour recovery session. Not like it'll recognize in windows anyway.

I don't have any experience with restoring data from dead disks. I have heard about software like EaseUS can restore data from hard disks. If you have sensitive data in your hard disks or any other physical devices then it is better to use any of the disaster recovery service. These services are very helpful for recovering any amount of data from any kind of disasters. Here in Ontario, I use Stage2Data for disaster recovery service. There are a lot of other companies offer this service at affordable rates.