External disk recovery (RAW data)

grumpycrab

Got a neighbour's 600GB external drive (strange size?) that has been corrupted and displays format as "RAW" - Windows asks to reformat the drive. Looking for a quick (and free if possible) way of data recovery (owner says the original data sources are still intact but this is a challenge for me)

1. Don't know what the original format was (FAT32 with Vista possibly) and so could convert from RAW to FAT32 but, I guess this will lose data.

2. The usual "freebies" EasUS and Partition Minitool all want money to do anything useful. (after taking an age to do a first pass scan and then playing the "pay me to recover data" card)

3. Trying testdisk but gave up when it said it would take 2 days; currently trying ddrescue to make an image which, in theory, will be easier/quicker to recover from; but its going to take 22 hours...and counting. Why are these tools so slow. Any suggestions? (apart from having some patience)

Neil_Jones

Easiest thing to do in a situation like this is take the drive out of the caddy and connect it to the motherboard direct, assuming you have a desktop computer.

If the drive becomes readable, the caddy is shot and needs replacing, you can get replacement caddies for about £15, you just put the new drive in it. The caddies tend to go before the drives themselves.

All versions of Windows 2000 and later format drives NTFS by default, except for pen drives which are all FAT32 out of the factory.

debitcardmayhem

Run it through TestDisk/Photorec https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Whoops ignore me watching TV semi reading and finish my tinny

debitcardmayhem

I guess

3. Trying testdisk but gave up when it said it would take 2 days; currently trying ddrescue to make an image which, in theory, will be easier/quicker to recover from; but its going to take 22 hours...and counting. Why are these tools so slow. Any suggestions? (apart from having some patience)

it's like reading the chinese version of Lord of The Rings and using Google to translate using a mobile phone.

forgotmyname

2 days is nothing for 600GB, going back some years now it took that long to recover raw data off a DVD.

Dont forget with RAW it needs to read every single bit of data, it looks for the file markers. Imagine looking through a dictionary for every single word with the characters "an" in it.

The problem is with no filesystem to keep it in order you may find en and the rest of the word has been deleted months ago.
Lots of deleted files.

boatman

I found partition guru worked on my drive although wasn't specifically in Raw. There is also recovery, worth a look.
Recovery:
http://www.eassos.com/eassos-recovery-free.php

Partition Guru
http://www.eassos.com/partitionguru-free.php
or
https://filehippo.com/download_partitionguru-free/

More info:
http://www.eassos.com/blog/how-to-convertchange-raw-file-system-to-ntfsfat-without-data-loss/

http://www.eassos.com/blog/recover-files-from-raw-hard-drive/

pmartin86

grumpycrab wrote: »

owner says the original data sources are still intact

Format and mvoe on, life is FAR to short to mess aobut with data recovery at the best of times, especialy when its not needed!

grumpycrab

pmartin86 wrote: »

Format and mvoe on, life is FAR to short to mess aobut with data recovery at the best of times, especialy when its not needed!

You're not wrong. And forgotmyname, yes painful looking at every bit of data. Would be nice to know what can be used in the future. Gave up with testdisk (due to operator incompetence) and trying PartitionGuru. Have about 40 sector read errors so thinking it may be best ditch the disk (or will format map them as unusable?).

GunJack

before you go too far, try reading the hdd from linux..

grumpycrab

GunJack wrote: »

before you go too far, try reading the hdd from linux..

Was running testdisk under linux but didn't think of just looking at the disk. Will try again (won't be for a while - PartitionGuru is running). At least I've found a spare computer to do this on and I can just leave it to do its thing.

pmartin86

grumpycrab wrote: »

You're not wrong. And forgotmyname, yes painful looking at every bit of data. Would be nice to know what can be used in the future. Gave up with testdisk (due to operator incompetence) and trying PartitionGuru. Have about 40 sector read errors so thinking it may be best ditch the disk (or will format map them as unusable?).

If you are insistant on punishing yourself, winfowd based Iv've had success with Recuva in the past - Recovered about 65% of a drive that was "accidentatly formatted and imaged"

https://www.piriform.com/recuva

If you need to go deeper, a live boot of GParted, a lot of reading and a lot of swearing has also helped me out of a tight spot (Door entry system with 24 individual doors, 70+ users and roughly 55 different access profiles stored/run off an 8 year old machine that doubled up as the receptionist working machine with NO backup...that was a fun day!

https://gparted.org/

https://gparted.org/display-doc.php%3Fname%3Dhelp-manual


Edit: Forgot to mention, if you havn't allready, try running a CHKDISk with the /X /F /R switches - Be surprised sometime how much it can recover. - More infor here:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc730714(v=ws.11).aspx