Need HELP with a ddrescue data recovery.

[Courtesy]

So last friday my 200GB SATA hard drive crashes. Silly me, I didn't back it up. Yeah...I know. I have no experience in data recovery whatsoever, but I'm learning very quickly over the past week. After much research on data recovery I decided to use ddrescue on the SystemRescueCd. The odd thing is that the SystemRescueCd was the only live cd that booted up on the PC besides BartPE. UBCD4WIN, Vista Recovery and UBCD for USB all stalled during boot.

I can only imagine that it was the faulty hard drive that was causing the problems. I moved the faulty SATA drive to another PC as a second drive and Vista stalled on boot. Hmmmm. After that attempt, I moved the drive back to the original PC and booted successfully with a bart PE disk. Ran the chkdsk/f/r utility which failed after a few hrs.

So after that I purchased a 500GB WD Caviar drive, installed it as the second SATA drive on the original PC. Booted up successfully with the SystemRescueCd. Created an 200GB NTFS Partition on the new drive with GParted. The faulty drive has 3 partitions on it. A 10GB utility, 30GB recovery and a 153GB NTFS Windows Vista OS partition. I decided to create an image of the 153 GB OS partition unto the 200GB partition I made with Gparted.

ddrescue /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb1

28 hrs later this is what I have

rescued:149174 MB errsize: 44086 kB, current rate: 0 B/s
ipos/opos: 3149 MB errors: 101, average rate 1449 kB/s
time of last successful read: 7h
splitting failed blocks....

Is it safe to say that it's time to pull the plug?
If I perhaps decided to do so, will I be able to recover the remaining data on the (149GB Partition) after running a chkdsk or fsck?

Thanks in advance and sorry for such a long post.
Cheers
Courtesy

 

[Vicenarian]

Yeah, UBCD4WIN, et. al can freeze up while booting if a bad HDD is plugged into the system in some circumstances. I've experienced this lately.

First of all...never chkdsk a (even possibly) dying drive. NEVER. Not even with /f or /p. It can stress the drive, and I have heard it can de-link clusters or something nasty like that. Just don't do it.


From what you listed above, it seems like you managed to clone the vast majority of the data onto the good drive. I wouldn't run a chkdsk either or anything like that on the now-rescued data...I'm not sure what fsck does. Isn't that the name of some designer t-shirt company? jk

What I would try, is this: disconnect the failing drive, leave the (good) drive you cloned onto plugged in, then boot from a Ubuntu live CD, and see if it will mount the filesystem. If so, then just rescue from that. If not, you might want to try Testdisk to recreate the partition table, and/or something like Getdataback for NTFS.

But yeah, wait till somebody else pitches in before you actually do anything. I'm still a data recovery noob myself.

 

[Courtesy]

Hahahaha.......Funny about the fsck. I read that fsck is a command in linux similar to chkdsk in windows. According to the ddrescue manual it says first repair the copy with fsck (e2fsck) or some other tool appropiate for the type of partition you are trying to rescue, then mount the repaired copy somewhere and try to recover the files in it. This is of course to be performed on the new drive.

After reading all of the horror stories about running chkdsk on a failing drive, I stopped that immediately.

BTW Vicenarian, I learned about ddrescue from one of your posts I believe. Thank God for Technibble!

 

[Crgky127]

I've found that sometimes it's worth trying ddrescue and dd_rescue.