PCFormat Forum Archive

Greetings All,

So my WD Raptor decided to go and die on me today. So I have used a spare hdd and installed Win7 on that hoping to still be able to access the drive for some recovery purposes. I was wrong the drive partition wants to be formatted .

So I boot up with a recovery cd and use a program called datarescue dd to make a raw image file of the hdd (currently has 2 crc errors) and here is where the question comes in. How do I read this raw image file to get the data back?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk

Have you tried using a program that searches for files directly from the drive, like Recuva?

Yep, it can't read boot sector so it aborts before going any further.

Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk

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I shall give that a try over the weekend however I think its far worse than just the table getting corrupt. The Western Digital HDD tool set gives me a 0220 error code when doing a short hdd test. I am pretty much resigned to the fact that all my saved games and characters have bitten the dust . I want to try a quick format and see if I can recover from that but I somehow doubt it will work...

DeamonTools should support RAW as an image format. Try mounting it in that, or some similar software?

jamin I take it you have a wee bit more experience with this than I do so here goes my questions but first some background info.

DataRescue's DD (in short DrDD) - is a graphical disk imager intended for data recovery and backup of partially corrupted storage devices. DrDD creates complete or partial images of disks or memory cards to files on another storage device, allowing multiple data recovery attempts on the raw data, thereby minimizing the risk of damaging the corrupted media further. DrDD is available for Windows PC and Mac OS X machines.

http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/v3/drdd.htm

Problem is they dont tell you how to access this RAW image file to recover things.

So the question is this even with a .dd extension which is essentially a RAW image without an extension I could still mount it?

Not AFAIK

dd is a 'nix command to do a disk dump, so I think you used a tool that just runs this command in Windows

A quick Google recommends http://www.aeroquartet.com/movierepair/ ... ndows.html

No guarantee on that working. if you had a proper .RAW file things would be a lot easier for you

Last week I had to fix a Dynamic disk that became "invalid" in Win7. I first tried editing the first sector with HexN as I read on the net, but it didn't help. I then had Disk Management revert the drive to a Basic disk, created a new partition, quick formatted the partition and ran Recuva with the option to check for files on a formatted partition. I managed to recover all the data I needed to.

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Well a program call Davory in its Eval form is able to read and recover from the physical disk not the partition if that makes any sense. So now its a case of finding something that can do the same...

*edit* If someone knows of a freeware app please let me know.

Do what I said in my post. Make a new partition, quick format, run Recuva with the option to scan a formatted drive (takes ages), and select the files you wish to recover.

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Well Recuva did the job for me it gave me a massive list of files that were on the drive before the quick format. Even files I deleted months ago showed up.

Hman wrote:Well Recuva did the job for me it gave me a massive list of files that were on the drive before the quick format. Even files I deleted months ago showed up.

The thing is though, Recuva wont detect the drive for me, keeps on complaining about there not being a file system/parition it can recognize. Other file recovery software keeps on complaining about being unable to access the MBR.

@ Prometheus I shall take you up on your offer. Will send you a PM when I get home and have the data. I really dont know what I am doing when it comes to repairing the the table. Always willing to learn .

Try testdisk, its a image that boots from a cd. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
I had a hard drive that some utility made the computer think it was FAT12 (supposed to be ntfs) and this thing fixed it.

Edit: Its also free.