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Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
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<p class="MsoNormal">One of my friends windows machine died today –
boots up
only half way through the windows splash screen and freezes. There is
one
file he wants to recover out of it, but it seems to be suffering from
hardware
failure because attaching the disk via USB enclosure to another
computer will
only let him load the USB mass storage device, and won’t go any further
than that…<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So my question is …<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">What are the software hard disk recovery
applications that
people like, which may save his file(s) and/or his dollars for him?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Of course, free is awesome, but commercial might
be ok too.</p>
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<br>
I had a WD drive on a Windows machine go bad on my some months ago. I
booted system rescue CD (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page">http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page</a>) and used
dd_rescue making multiple runs with multiple retries over about 30
hours. It managed to reduce 30 some bad blocks to only 4 or 5
unrecoverable.<br>
<br>
Of course, what this gets you is a drive image which you then have to
mount using the loopback driver if you want to recover files. If the
file system is not mountable, there are various Linux tools
which can be used to scrape through a large pile of bits and reassemble
files (they work better when the sectors are consecutive). However, I
haven't used said tools for several years as they are much less certain
than backups.<br>
<br>
I then restored the image to a good drive and ran chkdsk to verify file
system integrity. <br>
<br>
After I recovered what I could from the drive, I attempted to repair
the drive by overwriting the bad sectors ("dd if=/dev/zero..."), which
failed. I then ran WD's drive maintenance software as a requirement
for warranty return and their software managed to repair the drive. I
have put it back in service in a non-critical RAID and it has worked
perfectly for 6 months or so since the repair.<br>
<br>
--<br>
Dewey<br>
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