External disk recovery (RAW data)

Uxb1

It is about the ONLY thing I've ever found Linux is useful for is reading some data off a disk previously declared raw by MS Windows.
Linux managed to read and I could copy across some of the files, others only had the file name and nothing in them to be recovered and the rest was lost.

debitcardmayhem

ElenaGil wrote: »

Do not :spam:

Resurrection ....

BTW GC did you ever have any luck 1 year plus ago?

grumpycrab

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

BTW GC did you ever have any luck 1 year plus ago?

Blimey, cannot remember what happened last week, nevermind a year ago.
Coincidentally, just had a laptop hard fail last night - gave a really loud ticking noise at switch on - thought something was stuck in the fan at first. (Luckily backed up data earlier that day - not my computer!)

Steve_KK

You could try some proper forensics tools.

Start by downloading a (free) copy of FTK Imager from AccessData (they make software that law inforcement worldwide use). With this you open the physical disk in the application and it may find the partition information. From there you can export out any data you would like to keep.

If that fails then you are into paid for software, which isn't cheap, but you really do get what you pay for. I recently had a SSD that both Windows and Linux failed to find any partition data on. FTK Imager couldn't either, but opening within Imager allow be to confirm there was data on the drive (it displays the HEX data and I could tell Microsoft partitions were on that disk). I opened the disk with X-Ways Forensic and within second it showed the NTFS partitions. With a bit of knowledge it is then easy to export out the data or repair the disk partition table.

If you send a disk away to a high end recovery specialist this is the type of work they will perform, with the caveat that they will attach the source disk to a computer via a write blocker and not change any data on that original disk.

Regards,
Steve