I have had great success with ddrescue - http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
Unlike Spinrite and HDD Regenerator, it doesn't try and "make good" a failing hard drive, instead, it first copies all the data it can get on the first try, then retries the errored sectors many times until it recovers the data, or you give up. It also keeps a log file so you can pause and resume the recovery at any time. I usually use it from a linux livecd such as http://www.sysresccd.org The only caveat I would report is that it's a good idea not to restore your dd image to a file on an ntfs partition - Ntfs-3g and the likes will get progressively slower if it is a big file. It is better to sector - by sector restore to another hard disk, and keep the log file on a partition on another disk. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Scott Webster Sent: Monday, 15 March 2010 10:24 AM To: 'PaulDotCom Security Weekly Mailing List' Subject: Re: [Pauldotcom] HDD(corrupted) data recovery help? This should do the trick. http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm 80 bucks is better then thousands. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of William Gibson Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2010 3:51 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Pauldotcom] HDD(corrupted) data recovery help? So I just started having bad sectors in my WD external 1TB hdd and so I used an excelent software by dmitry HDD Regenerator. It actually fixed all of the bad sectors.I could read all the data but couldn't write to the hdd. SO I did an advance RMA(They send you a new one before you send the old one back). Few days later my new HDD arrived from WD but when I tried backing up all my data was gone.. *poof* the hdd was completely corrupted. All my windows computer detect it but does not populate it. I tried same (HDD Regenerator) software and its shows 0mb in 0sectors available and doesn't work. Do you have any forensics software which I could try to recover my data before sending it back? Also I dont have any PII in it, but lot of personal collections which I would love to recover. I don't to spend $$$ to send it to professional recovery people. Thanks, -W.Gibson.
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