Hey Peeps,

I'm trying to find a recovering program that will recover files off my bad hard drive. I used "PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery 4" on a WinBox but it errors out and I was wondering if any of you know some programs that will work on Linux or Win?

Cheers,

Chris

Typically I use dd_rescue to make an image of the drive somewhere else. Then I use testdisk, photorec, and foremost to try recovering stuff from the image.

Sometime I'd also like to fiddle around with The Coroner's Toolkit.

SpinRite will usually recover a bad HD, including the bad sectors. If the drive is genuinely bad, it won't stay recovered, but at least you'll be able to get your data off of it.

Spinrite is not free. I paid $89 for my copy, but I've never regretted it.

Is it ok to use ddrescue? And how would you go about to create the image and to pull the information off from it?

Thanks!

http://www.debianadmin.com/recover-d...-ddrescue.html

You basically create an image file (which I usually append .img to the filename). Then you just run photorec blah.img and follow the directions. I usually only try to do a few filetypes at a time. And most of the files will come back without names. I think there are some scripts you can find online that can grab some of the metadata and rename the files for you, but I haven't messed with that. My wife was just happy to have all her photos back... =)

Foremost is a similar tool that you can add some different filetype headers.

The Ubuntu Community has a pretty good write up here on data recovery. The biggest thing is to get an image of the hard drive and then do all your work from that image because every time you access a failed drive, you risk damaging it more.

Thank you pljvaldez for the information! I also wondering if you can do this if the partition is not visible?

photorec or testdisk are the only working solutions under linux