[dundee] Hard Drive recovery

[Lee Hughes]

I'm currently rescuing a damaged hard drive for a friend. it seems to be
covered with bad sectors

[ 3806.522176] ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 3806.522179] ata1.00: error: { UNC }
[ 3806.617872] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33
[ 3806.617900] ata1: EH complete
[ 3810.374961] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
[ 3810.374971] ata1.00: BMDMA stat 0x24
[ 3810.374979] ata1.00: cmd c8/00:08:c0:58:09/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in
[ 3810.374981]          res 51/40:08:c1:58:09/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x9 (media error)
[ 3810.374985] ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 3810.374988] ata1.00: error: { UNC }

so, every time it hits one of these sectors it ties the ata driver up for a least a minutes, sometimes more.

myrescue and ddrescue are both good tools, but I seem to be getting more
success with dd_rhelp. it seems quite clever at not getting bogged down in 'area's of bad sectors' , I've managed to recover 300m (in twenty mins) so far, best myrescue did was about 100M (and that was leaving it over night).

It not that linux crashes or anything when hitting bad sectors, it's just a time
constraint. also that ata driver seems to completely fail if I try and read to many bad sectors concurrently, if this is the drive failing or the driver , I just can't tell.

I'll let you know how I get on, I tempted to put in the freezer , see if I can get
any more data of it.

I think most of the file system is intract, however the partiton table is missing,
I hear gpart can recreate that? know any better ones? or in fact manual
recreation, the disk was NTFS , single partition?

what's you choice of free linux recovery tools?

fingers crossed...

Cheers,
Lee












      
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