Help restoring data from an image.

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captainhook

Help restoring data from an image.

Post by captainhook » Sun Feb 24, 2013 2:41 pm

Hello i had an external hdd die on me recently (my computer can see the drive, it just won't access it) and running some tests i saw the drive was full of bad sectors, after googling around i saw someone suggest making an image of the drive byte by byte? they said you needed to use software that would skip the bad sectors? well i used r-image and it created me a 9.47gb image of the drive.

Looking at my options in r-image if i select "connect an image as a virtual logical disk" the only option in the list is the external hdd and it doesn't even let me select it though that won't help me anyway. So next option i looked at was "restore image" and in that list it will show me the logical drive i am using right now but it talks about overwriting data, and says that the image file is too big. If i open the image in r-studio it says some message in a status window about "Read disk failed after two attempts, that media is write protected"

When the drive died and i saw the bad sectors i just assumed my data was lost and gave up but now after reading about being able to clone the drive and restore from that i have hope again... i'm not sure if the image i made was even setup right as you can already tell i'm new to this so any help is greatly appreciated, thanks.

Alt
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Re: Help restoring data from an image.

Post by Alt » Mon Feb 25, 2013 11:22 am

When bad sectors appear on a disk all of a sudden, that means its hardware failed. The best thing to do is to go to a data recovery professional with proper equipment and expertise. Do-it-yourself data recovery rarely yields something meaningful in such cases. For your case, for example, data recovery professionals have special hardware disk imagers that can, through some certain tricks, read even bad sectors. Yes, that costs, but there's a good rule of thumb: if the problem is easy, you'll wont pay much, if it's hard, you won't be able to solve it yourself.
Still, you're right using R-Studio for data recovery. You need to open the image you created using R-Drive Image. See on-line help for assistance: Images then you need to scan the image: Disk Scan, then recover files Data Recovery Using R-Studio/ Your case is Case 2. Recovery of files that have resided on a data disk with a damaged file system, or on a previously deleted or re-formatted partition.
Frankly, I doubt that will bring some success. Still, that's worth trying.

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