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#17
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Hopeless Data Recovery
Ken Blake wrote:
On Tue, 10 Oct 2017 19:01:30 -0500, Char Jackson wrote: On Tue, 10 Oct 2017 16:44:25 -0500, wrote: On Tue, 10 Oct 2017 14:12:39 -0500, Char Jackson wrote: On Tue, 10 Oct 2017 13:44:35 -0400, Paul wrote: J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: In message , Ken Blake writes: On Mon, 09 Oct 2017 23:19:30 -0500, wrote: So, I've come to the conclusion it's hopeless trying to recover from this drive. However, I am going to still see if a professional data recovery service can do it. In case you're not aware of it, such a service is *very* expensive. Be prepared to pay well over $1000 Wasn't there a piece of software - it either ran under DOS or included the OS, I think it was bootable in itself - that would repeatedly read until it got something (possibly taking days to do a disc)? I think it cost about 50 pounds. (I vaguely remember the name Spinrite, but that might be something else entirely.) I don't know if it works at all with modern (even as old as is being considered here) discs that have remapping firmware. GRC Spinrite ? How to beat a disk to death, in one easy lesson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite snip Every couple of posts in this thread, it might be worth reminding the OP that ddrescue is really the best hope. If that can't be made to run successfully for any number of reasons, then IMHO the amount of hope for success is greatly reduced. I would disconnect the problematic drive, multiple partitions and all, until I get ddescue working, even if that means buying a $15 optical drive if the PC can't boot from USB. Why is it that in a Windows newsgroup, it seems the only solution to anything is to use Linux? It might seem like that's the case, but I don't think that's a fair assessment. In the vast majority of cases, Windows has a decent assortment of tools available to get things done. You very rarely have to use a Linux tool. I, for one, have *never* used a Linux tool. As a matter of fact, I've never run Linux on any machine I've owned, not even for a minute. It's not that I have anything against Linux. It's rather that I see no need for it, know next to nothing about it, and am not willing to spend the time required to learn it. I'm happy with Windows. OK, take as your afternoon project, to find a working ddrescue equivalent for Windows. I'll wait... ******* The Cygwin port seems to work, but I don't know underneath whether every bit of the behavior is carefully reproduced. And you might blow a gasket, if you had to type /dev/sda (a Linux disk identifier) instead of \\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 (the Windows equivalent of /dev/sda). Cygwin uses /dev/sda type references. The disk lettering in that example, being in the same order as disks appear in Disk Management (first disk is sda, second disk is sdb, and so on). The Windows C: drive doesn't have to be on the first disk, and your C drive could easily be /dev/sdd2 for example. That would be the second partition, on the fourth disk in the list. And the Win10 Bash shell cannot be used for any of this, because the only level of file system access is /mnt/C , and no lower level disk access is currently possible. You would not expect a copy of ddrescue (if provided in the Bash shell), to work there because of that. I already tried something like that as a test case. The major achievement of the following tool, is exposing what Windows uses for its identifiers, under the hood. And the "dd --list" feature is a bonus, not found on other implementations. In fact, it's a shortcoming of ddrescue, that ddrescue doesn't have a means I could find, to list the disks before you start work, and assure the user of what they're reading or writing. http://www.chrysocome.net/dd But the chrysocome tool does not tolerate CRC errors, and like most Windows tools promising sector level access, simply stops dead at the first sign of trouble. Even when a tool makes a retry or two, the tool may not be designed for "multiple pass, best effort" cloning. And that's where ddrescue comes in. ******* In terms of backup/clone software, you can have: 1) Tool that will not tolerate CHKDSK failure. The backup/clone tool may run CHKDSK in verify mode, and if it sees even one issue, it stops dead and won't do the backup. Windows tools offering "smart copy" options, typically fail this way. 2) Windows tools which off a Preference to switch to "dumb copy", copy at the sector level. Now you no longer have to pass CHKDSK. But, if there is even one sector read with a CRC error, these tools stop dead. And to make matters worse, some dumb-ass tools doing (2), they do *not* copy the whole disk. They only copy what they *think* is every cluster with user data on it. This is how I managed to make a "dumb" clone which should have taken five hours, it only took ten minutes. Right away, I knew the tool was not "forensic grade" and was "garbage". 3) The next level, is the level not available in ordinary Windows software. That's the ddrescue sector-error-tolerant software, which copies the entire disk. This is your research project this afternoon. Have fun, Paul |
#18
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Hopeless Data Recovery
On Wed, 11 Oct 2017 09:54:57 -0700, Ken Blake
wrote: On Tue, 10 Oct 2017 19:01:30 -0500, Char Jackson wrote: On Tue, 10 Oct 2017 16:44:25 -0500, wrote: On Tue, 10 Oct 2017 14:12:39 -0500, Char Jackson wrote: On Tue, 10 Oct 2017 13:44:35 -0400, Paul wrote: J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: In message , Ken Blake writes: On Mon, 09 Oct 2017 23:19:30 -0500, wrote: So, I've come to the conclusion it's hopeless trying to recover from this drive. However, I am going to still see if a professional data recovery service can do it. In case you're not aware of it, such a service is *very* expensive. Be prepared to pay well over $1000 Wasn't there a piece of software - it either ran under DOS or included the OS, I think it was bootable in itself - that would repeatedly read until it got something (possibly taking days to do a disc)? I think it cost about 50 pounds. (I vaguely remember the name Spinrite, but that might be something else entirely.) I don't know if it works at all with modern (even as old as is being considered here) discs that have remapping firmware. GRC Spinrite ? How to beat a disk to death, in one easy lesson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite snip Every couple of posts in this thread, it might be worth reminding the OP that ddrescue is really the best hope. If that can't be made to run successfully for any number of reasons, then IMHO the amount of hope for success is greatly reduced. I would disconnect the problematic drive, multiple partitions and all, until I get ddescue working, even if that means buying a $15 optical drive if the PC can't boot from USB. Why is it that in a Windows newsgroup, it seems the only solution to anything is to use Linux? It might seem like that's the case, but I don't think that's a fair assessment. In the vast majority of cases, Windows has a decent assortment of tools available to get things done. You very rarely have to use a Linux tool. I, for one, have *never* used a Linux tool. As a matter of fact, I've never run Linux on any machine I've owned, not even for a minute. It's not that I have anything against Linux. It's rather that I see no need for it, know next to nothing about it, and am not willing to spend the time required to learn it. I'm happy with Windows. Exactly. Until you have a need for it, there's little reason to check it out unless you're just curious. But in the current case being discussed, I'd say there's a definite need for it. -- Char Jackson |
#19
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Hopeless Data Recovery
On Wed, 11 Oct 2017 15:36:48 -0500, Char Jackson
wrote: to use a Linux tool. I, for one, have *never* used a Linux tool. As a matter of fact, I've never run Linux on any machine I've owned, not even for a minute. It's not that I have anything against Linux. It's rather that I see no need for it, know next to nothing about it, and am not willing to spend the time required to learn it. I'm happy with Windows. Exactly. Until you have a need for it, there's little reason to check it out unless you're just curious. But in the current case being discussed, I'd say there's a definite need for it. I wanted ro learn Linux because I am not happy with the direction that Windows has been going. If MS kept supporting their older OSs. I'd be ok with Windows, but they are forcing people to use their new crap. I like Windows 98, and XP. From what I've heard, I'd probably like Win7 too, but I have not had the opportunity to use it. But I wont touch Win 8.x or 10. I dont want or need anything that bloated, complicated, or something that spys on me. It's very sad and unfortunate that Linux has been going the same direction. A few years ago, Linux was a way to use old hardware. Now Linux is as bloated as Windows 8 or 10. And considering that linux has a zillion distros, you would think that at least a few of them would still be simple and easy. Linux is far from easy as it is. Windows was always more user friendly and easy to use. I have tried many linux distros, most wont even load and the few that did would freeze up. (that was about 4 years ago). I learned to hate linux, and still do. However, there was one distro that I liked, and that was Pc-Linux OS. That think worked and almost looked like Win98. It boots from a flash drive, runs well on older computers, and it's easy to learn. Unfortunately they killed that one too. Now it's all 64bit. In the end, if I have anything to say, I think we are all way overdue for an entirely new operating system. NOT WINDOWS, NOT LINUX, but something totally new. However, I dont see that happening anytime soon. If MS really wanted to win back customers, they would create a simple OS, such as XP and support it indefinitely. At the same time they can continue to create their Windows 11 and beyond, for those Millenials who cant live without more power, and more buttons. After all, since none of them ever leave Facebook, none of those extra buttons ever get used anyhow. |
#20
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Hopeless Data Recovery
wrote:
Why is it that in a Windows newsgroup, it seems the only solution to anything is to use Linux? I ran into this while looking for something else. http://www.r-studio.com/ "Creates IMAGE FILES for an entire Hard Disk, Partition or its part. Such image files can be compressed and split into several files to put it on CD/DVD/flash or FAT16/FAT32/exFAT. Then the image files can be processed like regular disks." I think that's roughly equivalent to ddrescue, except it dumps to a large file, rather than cloning to a disk. Once you have the large file, you should be able to use regular dd to clone the image to a real disk drive. http://www.chrysocome.net/dd http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.6beta3.zip R-Studio runs in trial mode until you buy a license. I think the idea is, it teases you with the availability of your files, so perhaps you get the ddrescue part of it "for free". The license is rather expensive, as it violates the "$39.95 code of the hills" on such things. Notice how the table on that page, sells a FAT32 tool separate from an NTFS tool, forcing you to buy the $79.99 version to get a reasonable feature set. Paul |
#21
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Hopeless Data Recovery
On Sun, 15 Oct 2017 02:20:55 -0400, Paul wrote:
wrote: Why is it that in a Windows newsgroup, it seems the only solution to anything is to use Linux? I ran into this while looking for something else. http://www.r-studio.com/ "Creates IMAGE FILES for an entire Hard Disk, Partition or its part. Such image files can be compressed and split into several files to put it on CD/DVD/flash or FAT16/FAT32/exFAT. Then the image files can be processed like regular disks." I think that's roughly equivalent to ddrescue, except it dumps to a large file, rather than cloning to a disk. Once you have the large file, you should be able to use regular dd to clone the image to a real disk drive. http://www.chrysocome.net/dd http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.6beta3.zip R-Studio runs in trial mode until you buy a license. I think the idea is, it teases you with the availability of your files, so perhaps you get the ddrescue part of it "for free". The license is rather expensive, as it violates the "$39.95 code of the hills" on such things. Notice how the table on that page, sells a FAT32 tool separate from an NTFS tool, forcing you to buy the $79.99 version to get a reasonable feature set. Paul When I get back to trying to retrieve my data, I may look into this. But for now, I put that drive away. It had me too frustrated already. I have pretty much accepted that much of my data is gone forever, but I was hoping that I may run across someone who is more tekkie than me, who may be able to do something with it. In the meantime, I am seeking the websites to replace some of that data, piece by piece. There is a slight bit of a bright side to all of this. Before tossing this drive into my pile of abandoned projects, I booted up my XP machine with my old version of PC Linux OS. I plugged in that bad drive using the Drive to USB cables. Under PcLinux I was able to copy the entire folders I lack on my backups. They copied fairly well, and did not quit copying when it hit the bad files. In the end, it saved almost all the graphic images, text files, and saved HTML files. It did save almost all of my PDF files, and all of them open in my PDF reader. However, some of them are missing parts, have blank spaces, or contain random colors that are not original. Yet, this is the most complete method I found to retrieve the bad files. Windows did not even come close to saving them like PcLinux did. So, although I have said I hate Linux, I have to admit, this old version of PcLinux (which I believe is from 2009), is far superior to Windows for this purpose, and deserves praise. In fact, I may take one of my old computers and install it permanently on that machine. It's just too bad that this one and only linux distro which really works well, has been abandoned. |
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