This post describes my workflow in recovering data from defective harddrives. These harddrives are usually not readable in Windows and in most cases not even readable or mountable in linux as well. One of the great things with linux is all the tools that are available, just do a Google search and you find forum threads with suggestions on tools and ways to fix things.

Software used

• gddrescue

– create a disk image of the corrupted disk or partition:

# ddrescue -r3 /dev/sda rescue.img rescue.log -force

This command copies from data from harddisk /dev/sda to imagefile rescue.img and writes a log to the rescue.log file. You could have switched rescue.img with another harddisk like /dev/sdb if you would like to duplicate it. ddrescue will try to read data up to three times before it gives up and continues with other data. -force is a selfexplained switch that tells ddrescue to perform this operation despite any warnings.

• testdisk, http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk:_undelete_file_for_NTFS and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery
• mmls

– from The Sleuth Kit can show you the partitions found within an image

A good page about datarecovery https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery