[olug] drive recovery

[Steve Litt]

Eric W. Biederman said on Fri, 21 Mar 2025 12:00:22 -0500

>Tim Larson <telrsn at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Anyone had good luck with a data recovery service? I’ve got a drive
>> with the Click O Death I need to salvage files from.  
>
>What I have always done is copy the entire drive into a file with dd
>aka:
>	dd if=/dev/bad-drive of=bad-drive.bin conv=noerror

Use ddrescue with a log file. ddrescue with a log file is specifically
engineered to work on known defective drives. Obviously, put
bad-drive.bin on a known good drive, not on the known bad drive you're
trying to rescue. Obviously also, the ddrescue executable should be
running on a known good drive, and nothing it does should write to the
bad drive.

I've heard anecdotes of people refrigerating their drive for an hour to
make it work for awhile so they can get data off of it. The cool thing
about ddrescue with a log file is that, if the drive warms up and stops
working, you can stop ddrescue, re-refrigerate your drive, try again,
and it will start where it left off, kind of like rsync. Or at least
that's how I remember it.

But of course, depending on the value of the data, you might not want
to make this a DIY thing, but instead put it in the hands of a highly
competent professional. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to
distinguish the highly competent professionals from the carpetbagger
bumblers with good marketing.


SteveT

Steve Litt 

http://444domains.com