How to recover data from dead hard drive.

[Carmel NY]

On Fri, 13 Oct 2017 12:03:11 +0100, Frank Leonhardt (m) stated:

>Good list that. ddrescue is, IME, the place to start. Or have I confused it
>with dd_rescue again :-)
>
>But what do you mean by dead? If its not spinning or not recognized by the
>system as existing, you'll get nowhere with software. I transplant the
>platters to a new IDENTICAL drive mechanism and work from that. You can by an
>identical drive from companies who stock samples them "just in case".
>Unsurprisingly, they're not cheap. And transferring platters is not easy.
>
>I also have some expensive licensed software for recovering incomplete file
>systems, and charge Windows users like a wounded rhinoceros when they need
>their data back.

Years ago, I used "Spinrite" to recover a damaged drive. It worked better than
anything else on the market, at least for me, at the time. I don't think it
has been maintained in over a decade though.

Personally, I fail to understand why anyone with any "mission critical"
system would not be using some form of RAID. It doesn't make any sense to me.
Even my Laptop is configured to automatically back up data to a cloud service.
Even if the drive went south, I could restore all of my data.

-- 
Carmel