Page 1 of 1

Can someone help me with datarecovery&disk space management?

Posted: 11 Dec 2012, 23:12
by Antares
I'm trying to recover data off an image.dd file of a windows 7 HDD. I'm currently running ubuntu from a 1 TB external HDD which has the image of the disk I'm trying to recover data from on it, and the image is 484 GB. So already half of the external HDD is taken up. The corrupted internal HDD was unmountable until I used testdisk to list the files. It came back with only 200 GB's of my information. I copied those files over to the external HDD as a precaution.

So that's already 700 gigs on my 1TB drive from a 500 gig seagate HDD. (I just want to make sure I lose absolutely NO data - is this necessary to do though?) Now the final step is to use PhotoRec. I'm curious as to wether it will skip over what test disk already recovered, and only get the remaining 284 gbs? Or will it recover the whole drive as a seperate file?

Here are my ?'s

1. Are the precautions I've gone through to make sure I lose none of the potential recoverable data sensible and necessary? Or can they be modified to make more space?

2. Is the recovered data from photorec going to merge with that of the testdisk recovered? Or will it be a seperate file?

(Was not mentioned in the above paragraphs)
3. I'm running data recovery software on an image from a seperate HDD, although I'm using the same drive I'm extracting with as the place where the recovered data goes to. Is that okay because I'm using an image of a seperate disk? Or does one need to have two seperate drives (one for extracting one for receiving the data) through a medium like a Live CD?

Re: Can someone help me with datarecovery&disk space managem

Posted: 23 Dec 2012, 12:34
by cgrenier
Antares wrote: 1. Are the precautions I've gone through to make sure I lose none of the potential recoverable data sensible and necessary? Or can they be modified to make more space?
It's not necessary to keep the image.dd file if you don't modify the original partition.
Antares wrote: 2. Is the recovered data from photorec going to merge with that of the testdisk recovered? Or will it be a seperate file?
By default, PhotoRec recovers files from the free space of the partition and TestDisk copies allocated files, so they will be different files.
Antares wrote: (Was not mentioned in the above paragraphs)
3. I'm running data recovery software on an image from a seperate HDD, although I'm using the same drive I'm extracting with as the place where the recovered data goes to. Is that okay because I'm using an image of a seperate disk? Or does one need to have two seperate drives (one for extracting one for receiving the data) through a medium like a Live CD?
It's ok because you don't modify the source (here the image.dd file).
When no image file is used, you can use different partitions or different disks for source and destination.