data recovery tools

worthingsaxovtr · 24 Jun 2007 at 16:08

hello

do these work if the hard drive is knackered, or only if you deleted something.

cheers

nigel

worthingsaxovtr · 25 Jun 2007 at 06:49

for example using something like runtime get data back

fumbles · 25 Jun 2007 at 07:25

knackered

No.

worthingsaxovtr · 25 Jun 2007 at 07:37

lol sorry about my technical term, still quote new to this and learning

how about if it is failing, for example in windows can pull of some data but not lots of data,

take it the recovery tools work outside of windows

ByteJuggler · 25 Jun 2007 at 14:52

If the drive is starting to fail, the best thing to do is grab an image of it as soon as you can. Tools that are meant to deal with restoring/recovering deleted/formatted data presupposes a working disk to work on. If you try to recover data on a broken disk you might end up making things worse than they already are. Thus: Image/clone the dying disk to another working one, then use whatever recovery software you want on the healthy disk. To be really safe, make 2 copies of the dying disk, so if the recovery effort mashes up the imaged data on the healthy restore disk ,and you end up having to try something else, you still have another copy of the data to "restore" back onto the new disk to start from again, and don't have to go back to the original disk again.

worthingsaxovtr · 25 Jun 2007 at 16:53

cheers for the info much appreciated

worthingsaxovtr · 25 Jun 2007 at 20:00

how about acronis for image/cloning

and what for data recovery ?

ByteJuggler · 25 Jun 2007 at 22:51

Acronis should be reasonable for making an image providing there's not too many problem sectors. (If I remember correctly it'll prompt you to retry/ignore on every read error which might get tedious if there's more than a few problem sectors.) On failing disks with an unknown/substantial number of problem sectors I tend to use Linux's dd/dd_rescue/ddrescue commands to get an image of the dying disk while ignoring read errors (but while trying its damndest to get a good read.) The TRK CD is one Linux rescue cd that can be used for recovery purposes, and page I link to actually has a lot of sane advice for recovery as well.

As for other software to recover, there's several good tools, I'm sure others will chip in with recommendations, however it may be possible to get away with a simple chkdsk once you've rescued the partition off the dying disk, in which case another tool becomes surplus to requirements.