advice on speeding up recovery process
Posted: 10 Oct 2013, 20:10
I've been recovering data from a 3TB usb hard drive (western digital mybook). I accidentally knocked it off of a low shelf while it was reading or writing data. Partition tables are gone it seems and I am recovering data in the raw mode and photorec is building the files (over 20,000 files recovered so far). The process is very slow with an estimated 4500 hours left (I understand this may not be accurate). I've dedicated an older spare computer to do the recovery running linux from a live usb flash disk. The cpu on the machine is an 2.13 GHz Intel Core2 Duo Processor P7450 with 2gb ram. Question: Why don't I see much cpu or ram being used? The ram is typically about 2.5% with the cpu at around 0.3%. Is there anything that I might do to speed up this process? Photorec is returning good files so I am content to wait for the data but I worry about encoutering other drive problems if the recovery were to take many months.
I tried this too:
I have also tried removing the hard drive from the case and attached it to my pc via its sata interface but that resulted in errors due to western digital drives self encrypting so that they must be used with the usb controller board (bridge board) that that was used to write the data. Remember this the next time you are looking to buy an external usb hard drive. If the controller/bridge board fails or you just want to use the faster sata interface to recover your data on a newer model western digital external usb drives - you cannot. You must then spend a lot of money to have pro bypass the encryption and very few are capable of doing it. I'm not sure about other models from other mfrs. Here's a link to the western digital site with some info on the evil usb bridge board: http://community.wd.com/t5/Off-Topic-Di ... /true#M738
I tried this too:
I have also tried removing the hard drive from the case and attached it to my pc via its sata interface but that resulted in errors due to western digital drives self encrypting so that they must be used with the usb controller board (bridge board) that that was used to write the data. Remember this the next time you are looking to buy an external usb hard drive. If the controller/bridge board fails or you just want to use the faster sata interface to recover your data on a newer model western digital external usb drives - you cannot. You must then spend a lot of money to have pro bypass the encryption and very few are capable of doing it. I'm not sure about other models from other mfrs. Here's a link to the western digital site with some info on the evil usb bridge board: http://community.wd.com/t5/Off-Topic-Di ... /true#M738