Recovered Files With DDRESCUE But Can't Read Them
 

Hi all,

My name is Dean and I've recently recovered data from a 1tb external hdd by using a disk image I created with ddrescue. The hard drive had no physical damage but for some reason (I think because it got over loaded) it started failing, got corrupted and became unreadable. Actually the harddrive format could only be read as raw format. Test disk didn't work for some reason, photorec also gave similar problems (it was only able to recover some files) so I resorted to using DDrescue. I created an image using the command on Ubuntu 15.04 in terminal

~sudo ddrescue /dev/sdc1 /media/drivereader/BackupInfo/rescue.dd /media/drivereader/BackupInfo/Logfile/Log.txt~


So I was just about able to create a disk image on another 3TB free hard drive. I only received one error at the very end for some reason even after haven recovered the whole 1TB. The error said

~Input file Not Found: No such file or directory]~

but I mounted my disk image anyway and I dragged one of my files to the desktop and I am unable to read it or any of them. Some of the files note: are VOB movie files. When I open them they simply don't play or display the image at all in fact I did receive some error on windows about it being corrupted or something I think but on Linux when I tried to play a VOB file I received the error
~Could not determine type of stream~

if they're corrupted how can I fix them PLEASE, oh please! I really need these files thank you if anyone could help me, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks!

the usual answer is: the important files are always backed up, so you only need to use that to restore. To be serious: a corrupted file cannot be recovered easily, probably the drive could not be red. You may try to run:
od -xc <filename> | less
to check if those files had any content (at all).

Thank you so much for getting back to me. I put in the code you asked for one of the files and this is the result I got:


0000000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
\0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0
*
74074000000
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
(END)


Note this was also a .iso file with videos in it.

The first thing in case of corruption is to run fsck.

How do I run it? I need to know how I can read the files on a disk image I called rescue.img please?

What filesystem are you using?

Then Google for "fsck <filesystem>"

Note that since you're using a disk image, you likely won't need to run it as root.

That is an empty file, contains nothing but zeroes.
Usually that means ddrescue could not read the device and filled up the image with 0.

But probably I misunderstood something. You also may try to use dd to create a disk image.

Using dd would be correct, it will create an image without trying to repair it, so you can run fsck on it.