For this to take place, you must be cutting corners and not cloning the drive first
That is cloning the drive.
...and obviously getting very simple recoveries.
This is possible, and very likely.
I wonder how the non data recovery pros can do data recovery faster and with a higher success rate than the pros.
Must be nice knowing everything about every person you ever speak about.
My general rule of thumb is that if you run "fdisk -l" on the original drive before securing a full clone, you are taking unnecessary risks with your client's data.
Everything has a risk, if "safe" is a binary function than breathing is unsafe and you should stop now as a "breathing expert".
Assessing the situation through a tool that reads the partition table, and hard drives size descriptors through PXE booted environment is at minimum establishing the health of the drives data by testing to see if the partition table is readable. If it is not chances are the issue extends into the file table of the first partition which is essential in establishing your risk management plan for moving forward. The other tool I would use is to check the smart entries of the drive, chances are it can show how bad the situation is, but it's not something I entirely base my diagnostics around.
Each of these produces very little risk and possibly only 2 spin ups of the drive and produces enough evidence to know where to go from there even better if you have it set to post kernel messages to the console and can see hard/soft resets of the interface in real time. All this without mounting the drive and minimizing the risk while maximizing your diagnostic sense of the situation.
Cloning a drive without assessing the situation is silly. If the drive is at the point where fdisk -l may crash it my first instincts are to go after the essential data first with the tools at my disposal instead of running a full clone, which if "fdisk -l" is so detrimental to the drive a full blown clone would destroy the drive before any chance of getting that essential data off of it would occur.
Knowing the risk and making intelligent decisions on where to go from there is the professional way to go about business or any decision that requires risk management and customer expectations management. Blindly moving forward without knowing what you are up against with a mantra of "clone everything" is risking more then fdisk -l ever could and I find it silly a professional would pontificate such.
Thus: You are talking out of your fourth point of contact and should excuse yourself from this conversation until you realize you are not in a conversation with children whom you can scare with slogans ("If you haven't cloned it, you shouldn't be trying to recover from it.") or woo with your false sense of superiority.
Perhaps sticking to such hard rules as "Clone first zomg!" with such religious zealotry may explain your success rate being seemingly lower then this "non-pro" as you have tagged me; however, I think my success rate is knowing what fights to pick through risk management and educating my customers which leads to my data recovery work having a selection bias more towards the easier jobs.
Good day sir (or madam).
