How to restore .dd disk image?
Posted: 07 Mar 2012, 22:10
Hello Everyone,
I have a Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM01 3TB hard drive that used to be in an external enclosure (Seagate External Expansion drive 3TB). I had a pretty bad power-outage in my neighborhood when I was recording TV onto my drive prior. My Windows 7 system could no longer open the hard drive and it wants to format it, I suspected bad sector(s) and corrupted partition table may be the cause of it, so here is what I did.
(1)Got myself a 450w battery-backup surge protector
(2)Used TestDisk to find the lost partition, and found it YAY (Using GPT partition table type, an NTFS labled backup drive), deleted the partition table on the drive, replaced with the one found with TestDisk, no luck, Windows 7 still wants to format it.
(3)Tried using PhotoRec to recover the files, but the PhotoRec process will become unresponsive right about reading/recovering 50% sectors of I have. Tried two times and arriving to the same result. Suspected a bad sectors is causing the hang. Managed to salvage about 140GB of data out of 396GB of original data.
(4)This is when I take apart the external enclose and plug the bare-bone drive into my SATA slot. The system recognizes the drive now as an internal drive ST3000DM01, not a usb external drive.
(5)Used TestDisk to create an image of the NTFS partition found and put it onto the other working hard drive. The image is a .dd file and it holds 396GB, pretty sure I have around 300-ish GB of data on this disk so I am convinced that the image produced is the complete hard drive image.
(6)Using SeaTools (by Seagate) for Windows, the drive failed all tests even after the Fix->All Long, it suggested using DOS version of SeaTools to look into the LBAs and attempt to fix the bad sector. Strangely, under the DOS version the drive passed all tests with no bad sectors. Not even passed with repair, just passed without errors. Maybe the difference is due to Intel RAID Controller vs. just plain Intel ICH8/9/10 controller. I have a RAID 0 configuration, no RAID on this drive because it was on a USB and the usb controller is different from RAID.
(6)Because PhotoRec couldn't get pass a certain sector due to some unknown reason, I decided to low-level format this drive under DOS using SeaTools. The Full erase process took 14 hours. After that I formatted the entire drive in Windows. Used the Check disk tool, found no sector errors. Used SeaTools, the drive failed the self-short test but passed short and long generic tests with 3 passes, so funky results. Seems to rule out my bad-sector theory but hey, who knows.
--------------------------------------------NOW HERE IS THE QUESTION (?)----------------------------------------------------
Actually, it all boils down to one questions: How do I restore the disk image file .dd to my Seagate hard drive? What are the steps?
Couldn't find the steps anywhere. For TestDisk, Is the definition of image file different from what i think it is?
This is my first time trying to recover data using TestDisk, any help is appreciated.
I have a Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM01 3TB hard drive that used to be in an external enclosure (Seagate External Expansion drive 3TB). I had a pretty bad power-outage in my neighborhood when I was recording TV onto my drive prior. My Windows 7 system could no longer open the hard drive and it wants to format it, I suspected bad sector(s) and corrupted partition table may be the cause of it, so here is what I did.
(1)Got myself a 450w battery-backup surge protector
(2)Used TestDisk to find the lost partition, and found it YAY (Using GPT partition table type, an NTFS labled backup drive), deleted the partition table on the drive, replaced with the one found with TestDisk, no luck, Windows 7 still wants to format it.
(3)Tried using PhotoRec to recover the files, but the PhotoRec process will become unresponsive right about reading/recovering 50% sectors of I have. Tried two times and arriving to the same result. Suspected a bad sectors is causing the hang. Managed to salvage about 140GB of data out of 396GB of original data.
(4)This is when I take apart the external enclose and plug the bare-bone drive into my SATA slot. The system recognizes the drive now as an internal drive ST3000DM01, not a usb external drive.
(5)Used TestDisk to create an image of the NTFS partition found and put it onto the other working hard drive. The image is a .dd file and it holds 396GB, pretty sure I have around 300-ish GB of data on this disk so I am convinced that the image produced is the complete hard drive image.
(6)Using SeaTools (by Seagate) for Windows, the drive failed all tests even after the Fix->All Long, it suggested using DOS version of SeaTools to look into the LBAs and attempt to fix the bad sector. Strangely, under the DOS version the drive passed all tests with no bad sectors. Not even passed with repair, just passed without errors. Maybe the difference is due to Intel RAID Controller vs. just plain Intel ICH8/9/10 controller. I have a RAID 0 configuration, no RAID on this drive because it was on a USB and the usb controller is different from RAID.
(6)Because PhotoRec couldn't get pass a certain sector due to some unknown reason, I decided to low-level format this drive under DOS using SeaTools. The Full erase process took 14 hours. After that I formatted the entire drive in Windows. Used the Check disk tool, found no sector errors. Used SeaTools, the drive failed the self-short test but passed short and long generic tests with 3 passes, so funky results. Seems to rule out my bad-sector theory but hey, who knows.
--------------------------------------------NOW HERE IS THE QUESTION (?)----------------------------------------------------
Actually, it all boils down to one questions: How do I restore the disk image file .dd to my Seagate hard drive? What are the steps?
Couldn't find the steps anywhere. For TestDisk, Is the definition of image file different from what i think it is?
This is my first time trying to recover data using TestDisk, any help is appreciated.