Question: I have a dell laptop that recently “died” (It would get the blue screen of death upon starting) and the hard drive would make a weird cyclic clicking noises.
I wanted to see if I could use some tools on my linux machine to recover the data, so I plugged it into there.
If I run “fdisk” I get:
Disk /dev/sdb: 20.0 GB, 20003880960 bytes64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 19077 cylindersUnits = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytesDisk identifier: 0x64651a0aDisk /dev/sdb doesn’t contain a valid partition table
Fine, the partition table is messed up. ?However if I run “testdisk” in attempt to fix the table, it freezes at this point, making the same cyclical clicking noises:
Disk /dev/sdb – 20 GB / 18 GiB – CHS 19078 64 32Analyse cylinder ?158/19077: 00%
I don’t really care about the hard drive working again, and just the data, so I ran “gpart” to figure out where the partitions used to be. ?I got this:
dev(/dev/sdb) mss(512) chs(19077/64/32)(LBA) #s(39069696) size(19077mb)* Warning: strange partition table magic 0x2A55.Primary partition(1) ?type: 222(0xDE)(UNKNOWN) ?size: 15mb #s(31429) s(63-31491) ?chs: ?(0/1/1)-(3/126/63)d (0/1/32)-(15/24/4)r ?hex: ?00 01 01 00 DE 7E 3F 03 3F 00 00 00 C5 7A 00 00Primary partition(2) ?type: 007(0x07)(OS/2 HPFS, NTFS, QNX or Advanced UNIX) (BOOT) ?size: 19021mb #s(38956987) s(31492-38988478) ?chs: ?(4/0/1)-(895/126/63)d (15/24/5)-(19037/21/31)r ?hex: ?80 00 01 04 07 7E FF 7F 04 7B 00 00 BB 6F 52 02
So I tried to mount just to the old NTFS partition, but got an error:
sudo mount -o loop,ro,offset=16123904 -t ntfs /dev/sdb /mnt/usbNTFS signature is missing.
Ugh. ?Okay. ?But then I tried to get a raw data dump by running
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/home/erik/brokenhd skip=31492 count=38956987
But the file got up to 59885568 bytes, and made the same cyclical clicking noises.
Obviously there is a bad sector, but I don’t know what to do about it!
The data is still there… if I view that 57MB file in textpad… I can see raw data from files.
How can I get my data back?
Thanks for any suggestions,
Solution:
I was able to recover about 90% of my data:
Answer: DDrescue is designed to get data off in situations like this. Then try mounting the image, and if files are missing give testdisk and photorec a chance on the image.