hello friends ,

so i was doing an image of my failing HDD but the hard drive died before the image complete !

now i have about 80 Giga image out of my 160 HDD

i tried to mount this image but i couldn't ! what can i do ?

thank you

When you say the drive is dead, does it still spin up? Does Linux still see it as a drive? Does the drive click or make sound?

If it Linux can find the drive and the drive makes noise... You might be able temperately fix it just to copy data off it. This is a last solution fix and the windows of time that you have to copy the data is very limited.

If all the above is the case then you can try the following:
1) Shutdown the computer and take the drive out and let it cool down completely until its regular temperature.
2) Find a zip lock bag and pressure test it to ensure water and vapor can't get to the bag.
3) Place the damaged drive in the freezer.
4) Let the hard drive sit in the freezer until the drive gets really cold.
5) Quickly and I mean very quickly hoot the drive up to the computer again (do not put it in the computer case itself, the reason for this is the case will cause the drive to warm up after because of the restricted air flow.
6) Use dd (diskdump) to capture the image of the drive (dd if=/drive/to/copy of=/drive/image/to/copy/to conv=noerror,sync ) This will attempt to copy the damaged drive at block level to either an image file or another hard drive.

The reason why this works is because when you freeze the drive you are causing the barring inside to shrink a tiny bit, which can help fix the old clicking sound on hard drives and will buy you sometime to allow you to copy the data over (whats left of it anyways if there are too many damaged sectors then dd will skip them but pad the skipped sectors with zeros so if the drive is too damaged recovery might not be possible.

(Warning: I am not responsible for damages if you skip steps and fail to seal the drive in the bag properly, if done correctly it works, if not moisture will build up on the drive and you will fry something, be it the drive or the controller, you have been warned!)

...should be "the reason why this might work". At least that's my practical experience.


I'd suggest ddrescue or dd_rescue instead (see the manual pages of both for an explanation why) unless disk contents should be recovered at all costs. Then the OP shouldn't waste time freezing it but contact a professional recovery service instead...



With what exact command did you make the backup?
Did you copy to another disk or to a file on that disk?
Was the size of the target disk equal to or greater than the source disk?
Were target disk contents zeroed out before copying or else what data did it hold?
Can you run 'testdisk /debug /log' on the target disk, run analysis, quit and then attach (plain text) or Pastebin the log file?

thank you for your reply , am familiar with the freezer method , but my hard drive died completely , it's gone to the drives heavens by now.

any thing i can do with the semi-image ?

thank you again

thank you all ,

problem solved after using foremost -i image_file