[jaclaz]

saman0suke, on 15 September 2011 - 07:21 PM, said:

I still need to try doing it in parts then, but, why so many errors?

Because that poor disk drive developed a defect and later torture was used on it?

saman0suke, on 15 September 2011 - 07:21 PM, said:

is there a possibility to recover something? thanks!

Who knows?
The idea is to try and see.
Remember that "something" is NOT "everything", and that when attempting recovering data form a failed drive sometimes you win and sometimes you loose.


jaclaz

[saman0suke]

Ok then, I will keep trying as soon as possible, since I'm busy with work right now :/ I will post my results, once again, thanks for all the help!

[Ponch]

jaclaz, on 31 August 2011 - 02:13 AM, said:

dozens of people that had no idea WHAT they were doing or were adviced by the same peeps that suggested saman0suke updating the firmware or putting the disk in the freezer.

Fyi, as reported by othe people and myself, the freezer trick does work. The fact it works in some cases only doesn't mean its just voodoo tales from people that have no idea what they are doing. Anyone knowing about electronics knows that a cooled component does behave differently from a hot component. If you lower the start temperature of the board enough (I agree people who tell you "it needs two days" have no idea what they are doing), you can in certain cases get a failing drive to work a few minutes longer. What I had is a drive failing after 30 seconds, thus totally unusable, these were my specific symptoms, the drive would not even be recognized by Bios at a 2nd consecutive boot. Then after an hour in the freezer, it failed after about 5 minutes, just enough for me to pick up some files I needed. This is not a fairy tale I invented so I'd look ... cool . Key words here are "in some cases".

[jaclaz]

Ponch, on 27 September 2011 - 12:35 AM, said:

Fyi, as reported by othe people and myself, the freezer trick does work.

Sure it does, re-read please:

jaclaz, on 30 August 2011 - 10:44 AM, said:

Well, the freezer trick (if done properly) should NOT make things worse (or MUCH worse ).
It simply WON'T do ANYTHING.
It is mostly a myth, though it can work in a very limited amount of cases, it is NOT something that you should normally even THINK to do.
But it is pretty much harmless.

If you have a deep cut, cleaning it and disinfecting it with appropriate disinfectants has proved to help greatly, nearly 100%, in preventing infections.
If you have a deep cut, and you have nothing appropriate, covering it with mud has proved to help preventing infections in a limited number of cases.
If you have a broken leg with no external bruises or cuts, disinfecting it won't do anything to help heal the fracture.

The freezer trick CAN be a cure for a few "illnesses", but it is not, like it is widely promoted on the internet, "the" cure for EACH AND ANY problem your hard disk drive may have.

Symptoms that may be (if not cured) reduced temporarily by the "freezer trick" are typically:

• drive "disappearing" after a few seconds/minutes from power up/spin up
  
• drive clicking/clanking
  
• one or more than one of the chips on the PCB anormally heating up
  
• cracked solder joints (for this it is better to check and re-solder/heat up the joint)
  
• stuck bearing (freezing VERY rarely can be useful for this)

jaclaz

This post has been edited by jaclaz: 28 September 2011 - 02:59 AM

[saman0suke]

Haven't had any time to keep the hd running with the software :/ too much work, I will try to do it this week and post the results, thanks!

[saman0suke]

Hello again, I couldn't do anything before regarding the disk, but a friend of mine helped me to scan the damaged hard drive with DD ( which is DataRescue_DD I'm assuming) and got an .IMG image, which is about 60 GB (the hard drive is 500 GB with two partitions, one of 400 GB and the other 100 GB, I just need the 100 GB, so he got 60 out of 100 GB), now, I can mount this image with Daemon Tools for example and see what I can recover? or what would be the next step? thanks!!

[jaclaz]

saman0suke, on 06 February 2012 - 09:45 AM, said:

Hello again, I couldn't do anything before regarding the disk, but a friend of mine helped me to scan the damaged hard drive with DD ( which is DataRescue_DD I'm assuming) and got an .IMG image, which is about 60 GB (the hard drive is 500 GB with two partitions, one of 400 GB and the other 100 GB, I just need the 100 GB, so he got 60 out of 100 GB), now, I can mount this image with Daemon Tools for example and see what I can recover? or what would be the next step? thanks!!

It is more likely that it is the "real" dd (originally for Linux) or maybe dd_rescue or ddrescue (two very confusingly named forks of dd aimed to data recovery still for Linux).

There is no way to suggest you an app without knowing something more about what was recovered.
If it was just the beginning of second partition, i.e. it's first sector is a bootsector, the best tool you can use to attempt mounting it is IMDISK (under windows), but it is possible that some data needs to be corrected, I would rather create a dummy MBR and mount it in TESTDISK.

If you post first few - say 100 or 200 - sectors of the image you have I can have a look at them and ossibly give you some more targeted advice.

A suitable tool (under Windows) is dsfo, part of the DSFOK toolkit, :
http://members.ozema...eezip/freeware/
Unzip everything in a directory, say C:\dsfok\
Open a command prompt, navigate to it, then issue command:

dsfo C:\whatever\yourimage.img 0 102400 myfirst200.bin

you will get in the directory file myfirst200.bin with size 102,400 bytes that represent first 200 sectors of your image, then compress the .bin in a .zip archive and either attache it to your next post r upload it somewhere an post a link to it.

jaclaz

[saman0suke]

Nice to see you around, and thanks for all the help as usual I will get the image from this guy today, and will do what you're asking me to, actually he used the "original" dd, that's correct, by the way, I was reading some articles about using some tools like Foremost, Scalpel, MagicRescue on the .img file, what do you think about these tools? I will work on a copy of the image of course, I wouldn't like to ruin the image as well :S thanks!!

[jaclaz]

saman0suke, on 06 February 2012 - 11:07 AM, said:

Nice to see you around, and thanks for all the help as usual I will get the image from this guy today, and will do what you're asking me to, actually he used the "original" dd, that's correct, by the way, I was reading some articles about using some tools like Foremost, Scalpel, MagicRescue on the .img file, what do you think about these tools? I will work on a copy of the image of course, I wouldn't like to ruin the image as well :S thanks!!

Well, there is some "canonical" order in data recovery, which basically is:

Quote

Aim for the stars and maybe you'll reach the sky
(and be prepared to go no higher than 1 foot)

So you try to recover:

• whole disks
  
• if above not possible, whole partition/filesystem(s)
  
• if above not possible, whole file(s)
  
• if above not possible, fragment(s) of file(s)
  
• if above not possible, you have (yet another) doorstop

exactly in this order .

jaclaz

[saman0suke]

I'm currently on step 2, since trying to get a 500 GB image from an almost dead hard drive will take many days, if it's possible, besides I'm interested only on the 100 GB partition :S, I have the image with me, I will work with it when I get home, thanks!

[saman0suke]

Ok, I just created the file you requested, here it is, please let me know about anything, thanks in advanced!!

Attached File(s)

•  myfirst200.zip (241bytes)
  Number of downloads: 2

[jaclaz]

saman0suke, on 08 February 2012 - 11:04 PM, said:

Ok, I just created the file you requested, here it is, please let me know about anything, thanks in advanced!!

You are not going to get very far if the recovered data is like this.
The file you posted consists of ONLY 00's.

I hope that this is only somehow "a glitch in the matrix" and that the rest of the file actually contains data .

You should first thing calculate the MD5 of the image file you have in your hands and compare it with the result of using this:
http://www.edenprime...hCalculator.htm

A suitable tool to calculate the hash on the image is http://www.nirsoft.n...h_my_files.html

jaclaz

[saman0suke]

jaclaz, on 09 February 2012 - 02:20 AM, said:

saman0suke, on 08 February 2012 - 11:04 PM, said:

Ok, I just created the file you requested, here it is, please let me know about anything, thanks in advanced!!

You are not going to get very far if the recovered data is like this.
The file you posted consists of ONLY 00's.

I hope that this is only somehow "a glitch in the matrix" and that the rest of the file actually contains data .

You should first thing calculate the MD5 of the image file you have in your hands and compare it with the result of using this:
http://www.edenprime...hCalculator.htm

A suitable tool to calculate the hash on the image is http://www.nirsoft.n...h_my_files.html

jaclaz

Well, that's not good I will do the following and post the results, is it possible to have a 60 GB image with no data at all? thanks!

[saman0suke]

Got it, it's actually the same, what can I get from this? thanks in advanced!!!

[jaclaz]

saman0suke, on 11 February 2012 - 11:57 AM, said:

Got it, it's actually the same, what can I get from this? thanks in advanced!!!

NOTHING.

I will translate:

EITHER

• your friend used dd wrongly
  OR
  
• the whatever he dd'ed was all 00's
  OR
  
• an unknown error happpened
  OR
  
• your actual disk is all 00's.

I don't really want to somehow take advantage of your misfortune till now, BUT if you quickly review this thread you will see how it goes like this:
saman0suke: I need help and advice for ....
jaclaz: first thing you should use tool A using it along procedure B
saman0suke: OK, I used tool A with procedure C then
jaclaz: well, as said you should use tool A along procedure B
saman0suke: OK, I had a friend using maybe tool D along an unknown procedure, here is the result
jaclaz: result is no good

Your turn.

jaclaz

This post has been edited by jaclaz: 11 February 2012 - 05:19 PM

[saman0suke]

jaclaz, on 11 February 2012 - 03:54 PM, said:

saman0suke, on 11 February 2012 - 11:57 AM, said:

Got it, it's actually the same, what can I get from this? thanks in advanced!!!

NOTHING.

I will translate:

EITHER

• your friend used dd wrongly
  OR
  
• the whatever he dd'ed was all 00's
  OR
  
• an unknown error happpened
  OR
  
• your actual disk is all 00's.

I don't really want to somehow take advantage of your misfortune till now, BUT if you quickly review this thread you will see how it goes like this:
saman0suke: I need help and advice for ....
jaclaz: first thing you should use tool A using it along procedure B
saman0suke: OK, I used tool A with procedure C then
jaclaz: well, as said you should use tool A along procedure B
saman0suke: OK, I had a friend using maybe tool D along an unknown procedure, here is the result
jaclaz: result is no good

Your turn.

jaclaz

Well, I can't tell if he made a mistake or something, he really knows about linux tools and all that since its job is about working on that environment, I asked him to create another image since he can leave the hard drive scanning at his work where they have like a "cold room" for the servers, disks, etc, that's why I asked this to him, maybe with a second image we could do something, but to be honest, I don't think is either a problem with the user or dd, more with the disk itself I'm sure he used dd since he told me a few days ago, maybe If I ask him the steps he made so I can tell you, and make sure he's not skipping a step, or doing it in the wrong way...

This post has been edited by saman0suke: 12 February 2012 - 07:28 PM

[jaclaz]

saman0suke, on 12 February 2012 - 07:26 PM, said:

Well, I can't tell if he made a mistake or something, he really knows about linux tools and all that since its job is about working on that environment, I asked him to create another image since he can leave the hard drive scanning at his work where they have like a "cold room" for the servers, disks, etc, that's why I asked this to him, maybe with a second image we could do something, but to be honest, I don't think is either a problem with the user or dd, more with the disk itself I'm sure he used dd since he told me a few days ago, maybe If I ask him the steps he made so I can tell you, and make sure he's not skipping a step, or doing it in the wrong way...

I really don't want to make a case out of it , but really, if your friend used "plain" dd on a disk that has problems, he cannot be this great Linux expert, as *any* Linux user knows (or should know) about two specific dd versions for recovery:

• ddrescue: http://www.gnu.org/s...e/ddrescue.html
  
• dd_rescue: http://www.garloff.d...linux/ddrescue/

jaclaz

[saman0suke]

Ok, then let's do the following, please guide me about what to do with ddrescue or dd_rescue, and I will ask him to do it, problem of doing it myself is that I wouldn't like to let the computer turned on for days doing the scan, and If I save the progress day by day I will never finish thanks a LOT for the patience!!

[jaclaz]

saman0suke, on 12 February 2012 - 08:57 PM, said:

Ok, then let's do the following, please guide me about what to do with ddrescue or dd_rescue, and I will ask him to do it, problem of doing it myself is that I wouldn't like to let the computer turned on for days doing the scan, and If I save the progress day by day I will never finish thanks a LOT for the patience!!

My personal preference is for dd_rescue:
http://www.garloff.d...linux/ddrescue/
used TOGETHER with dd_rhelp
http://www.kalysto.o...p/index.en.html
the latter is very well documented and extremely simple to use, in practice it takes the manual intervention out from using dd_rescue directly.

jaclaz

[saman0suke]

Thanks, I've been busy with work these days, but I will try to make a last effort, once again, thanks for being so patient!!