hard disk data recovery
Recently, I had to recover data on a defective hard drive.
Informations on this page helped me : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery
So, this is a memo (in case the source page disappear) :
- if your partition table is broken, try to fix it with tools like : testdisk, ntfsfix (ntfsprogs package)
- install ddrescue (on Debian based) :
apt-get install gddrescue
ddrescue is able to build an image file of your disk/partition - try to recover maximum data, the fastest way possible :
ddrescue —no-split /dev/hda1 imagefile logfile - you can ask ddrescue to retry (3 times here) :
ddrescue —direct —max-retries=3 /dev/hda1 imagefile logfile - you want more (retrim = reread full sector) ?
ddrescue —direct —retrim —max-retries=3 /dev/hda1 imagefile logfile - now, you can install foremost
This tool will be able to read your image file to recover files and store them by mime-types (extensions) : pdf, xls, xlsx, doc, docx…
foremost can do partition to partition recovery, partition to directory
Equivalent to foremost : magicrescue, photorec, scalpel… - ask foremost to rebuild files :
mkdir -p /mnt/recovery/foremost
foremost -i image -o /mnt/recovery/foremost
of course, the destination of recovered files must not be on the junk drive !
