DDRescue Rig

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tekcap

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After doing some research on Data Recovery practices I've decided that imaging the drive should be a priority. DDRescue seems to be a great choice but unfortunately I run Windows on my 2 computers and I can NOT afford to have them down for a few days while I dual boot to Linux or some Live CD. It seems like I'm stuck building a rig specifically for this, or I rig my netbook to support this somehow.

I already have a free 2TB hard drive which I'm assuming should be enough to image most drives. I would probably refuse to do anything over 1TB anyway since from what I've understood it would take ages to image. I will need 2 SATA bays and 1 IDE. 1 SATA bay for my drive that will hold the image and the other SATA/IDE for the client's hard drive. Are there any specific CPU/memory combinations that speed up this process? Could I get away with doing this using external cases and SATA to USB adapters in my netbook, or would that slow things down?
 
You really want to avoid running imaging through any bridge devices, like USB2SATA. In particular USB. That runs through the processor so you will be limited by that. So you should shoot for native interfaces in a desktop form factor.

That all being said I do have a USB2SATA I carry with me to use with a laptop for onsite stuff. But that is only for the quick grabs such as OS does not boot but the partition table is still good so I can quickly grab a file(s).
 
Just get an old core2duo tower. I've also used a P4 with much success. I'm not the type to leave it run for days, if it slows down to a crawl, switch to reverse then stop when it has reaches the slow spot again and see what you've managed to get.
 
As others have mentioned, it doesn't take a lot of horsepower to run a ddrescue box. I would echo previous suggestions and advise using direct SATA connections; SATA can handle more errors than USB, so you'll get more stability and better performance. USB adapters also tend to skimp on power for the drive, so hooking it into a PC power supply is something I recommend as well.

For your OS, you can choose almost any *nix flavor under the sun. However, I'd say Ubuntu is your best option for you (because of the Gnome disk manager, the wealth of documentation, and the simplicity of the install). However, I would install to a HDD (and not live disk it) because of the log file. If you loose power during a live disk session, the DD log file is most likely in memory, and it'll be gone.
 
Excellent advice, thank you!

How about SD Cards, are we stuck buying those cheap Chinese USB adapters for them?

Any experience with SATA 2.0 and 3.0? Is it worth spending a bit more on a MOBO that supports 3.0 for data rescue?
 
I'd get a nice 3.5" "floppy" style card reader that hooks to a USB header for those. Quality is the name of the game, so I'd buy a name brand reader. Since most drives won't read at full speed, SATA 2 should work fine.
 
Any recommendation on the 3.5 "Floppy" style card reader? I've had so much bad experience buying these things in the past!
Good observation on the Drive speed not being an issue!

I haven't decided on how many drives I would be doing a week, but for now I'm assuming 1 a week.
 
tekcap said:
Any recommendation on the 3.5 "Floppy" style card reader? I've had so much bad experience buying these things in the past!
Good observation on the Drive speed not being an issue!

I haven't decided on how many drives I would be doing a week, but for now I'm assuming 1 a week.
Click to expand...
If you are looking to do one a week, I'd seriously recommend investing in a RapidSpar unit instead of a special system for ddrescue.
 
A special system would cost me roughly 150$ including cables and all. The Rapidstar looks beautiful but costs thousands! Don't get me wrong though, as soon as things take off I'm going straight for one of these hardware machines I've seen talked about here.
 
I have a old dual core donated to me that I have left open on one side with power and sata cables hanging out to connect drives to, I made two partitions on the master drive with a dual boot menu with win 7 with windows tools, other ubuntu with ddrescue, works great
 
I built out a low power ITX build @ 45w MAX at the wall for this very thing. 6 x Onboard USB 3.0 and 2 x PCIe-x1 SATA IO cards for a total of 6 SATA ports.
 
I have an old machine that has a 2TB internal drive as well as two 3.5 inch removable drive bays and a dual 2.5 inch removable bay so that I can use it to ddrescue to either the internal drive or directly to a new drive and all using SATA rather than USB. Or it can be used for drive duplicating, duplicating direct to SSD, partitioning tasks, drive wiping or data recovery (never directly from a damaged drive).
I originally set it up 5 or 6 years ago with a second hand core duo board, but that died a couple of years ago, so it has an i5 and newer board now. Runs dual boot Windows 7 and Linuxmint, but often boots Parted Magic from a USB stick.
 
I've got my old Thinkpad W510 I use with an eSata dock. Works just fine. I also built a bench machine using an Asus A88X-Pro motherboard which I use for random tasks, including hdd imaging/cloning/rescue. Its got two eSata ports and there's two eSata docks hooked up to it. Its also got a hotswap 5.5" bay, and USB 3.1 ports so I really like to use it over the thinkpad if I have nothing else I need it for.

I'll also be grabbing the RapidSpar at some point, since it looks great.
 
I'm currently trialing a RapidSpar and I have to say I really like it.

Just today I retrieved customers files from 2 failing hard drives, plug it in, load it up, point to the directory you want and save them to your local hard drive. Couple of minutes later I had the data. One of the drives took a really long time to read the MFT with the device reporting errors and I didnt hold out much hope, but once it got there I was able to retrieve the 3.5gb of needed files in a few minutes, with only one file unrecoverable.

With the other drive the RapidSpar was reporting errors as it was saving the data but out of 4000 odd files it recovered all but 66 files, the customer was more than happy. Again all done and dusted in a very short time.

I also had a small problem / question with the system this morning and fired off an email. Allowing for the time difference I got a call from Vlad as soon as they opened for business. The problem was actually at my end (flaky internet connection) but I was pleasantly surprised to get a call rather than a boiler plate email reply.

Now I must point out I may have been able to achieve the same thing by just using a live cd if the drive wasn't too bad, or I may have been able to image it with ddrescue and get the files that way, I didn't actually check those options with these 2 drives. In the short time I have had the RapidSpar it just feels like my goto tool for dodgy drives. The speed and the sheer convenience of the thing over waiting hours or days for ddrescue to complete an image, or even having to boot up a Linux recovery rig and leave my desk. I have it plugged into my daily driver desktop at the minute as I trial it. I can fire up the software, start the recovery then continue using my machine.

I didn't mean for this to turn into a review for the RapidSpar but if you do this type of recovery quite often I would give it serious thought. Time is money and all that. I will say I have had good success with DDRescue before this. As pointed out any old core 2 duo will do, get yourself some long sata cables and power cable extensions too.

Unfortunately for me I cant afford the RapidSpar at the minute, Start of October I get hit with all my vehicles and public liability insurance for the year. Only for that I might be insisting on keeping it!
 
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