Data Recovery with DDRescue
by PhoenixGames on Dec.21, 2014, under Miscellany, Software and Games
ddrescue is a linux based tool for recovering data from failed or failing hard disks. I had the unfortunate need to use this tool on a badly corrupted (and partially physically damaged) disk some time ago, and I would like to post about it’s incredible effectiveness.
The disk in question was a 250GB laptop disk. It was showing up in the hardware list in windows, but no data recovery program I ran could access it. Testdisk could see the disk, but not recover data from it.
I installed Ubuntu linux on another machine, and set up and ran ddrescue. It took several WEEKS to complete, but it managed to recover all but 28.8 mb’s of data. That’s over 99.98 percent of the data! This is really an excellent result.
Part of the reason why I am posting this is because, during my research, I could not find any reference to ddrescue taking this long. I came across examples of ddrescue taking days, or maybe a week, but never this long.
Some users of the program might be inclined to cancel ddrescue after a few days, believing it to be a lost cause, but it is important to realise that with this program data recovery can take several weeks or more!
After I got the data back, it turned out that the MFT (Master File Table) on the drive was completely destroyed, and I was unable to mount and copy files in the usual way. However, conventional data recovery programs like Zero Assumption Recovery were able to easily recover what seems to be all of the data on the disk.
