Recover Files from a Hard Drive Crash « The Quick Brown Fox…….Is Dead

Recover Files from a Hard Drive Crash

#Buy a cheap usb hard disk

#Build a copy of the drive (disk image) on that with a cd bootable linux distro like http://www.sysresccd.org/ . You can build the image with dd_rhelp , http://www.kalysto.org/utilities/dd_rhelp/index.en.html

#After building the image copy that to a new hard disk with simple dd if=imagefile.img of=new_harddisk_device (usually hda or sda) .

#You have to rebuild the partition table with gpart or testdisk (www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) .

#You must recovery the boot sector to boot the system. Start the Windows recovery console from a windows installation cd. Use the fixmbr command to recover the boot sector. Also run chkdsk . I’ve also used BartPE (www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/) to run these commands. I’ve been able to recover over 97% of data on 6 hard disks with these methods.

#You can also directly “mount” the disk image which you have built with dd_rhelp / dd_rescue in linux using the loop back device. After that you have a choice of copying the files to the usb drive in other directories.

Links:
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/recover-data-from-a-damaged-hard-disk-using-dd_rhelp.html

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2004/07/save_your_data_from_the_click.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite

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Mounting disk images in Linux (howto):
http://edseek.com/~jasonb/articles/linux_loopback.html

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SpinRite 6.0 for Windows XP (NTFS),
FAT, Linux, Novell, and ALL OTHER file systems!