Very slow progress (2% after 24 hrs)

Using PhotoRec to recover lost data
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PaulJ
Posts: 1
Joined: 13 Apr 2013, 15:08

Very slow progress (2% after 24 hrs)

#1 Post by PaulJ »

Hi there,

I am trying to recover data from a friends failing hard drive.

The computer stopped booting, tried Win XP recovery console options without luck. Realised the drive is in serious trouble.

Am using TestDisk from within BootMed Pro. TestDisk reports the structure as ok on the standard search and I left it at that. I then decided to try and take an image of the drive so that I have a copy of it to further work on and try and extract the files from.

After almost 23 hours it has only created about 1.5 Gb of the 78 Gb hard drive. Estimate it would take about 45 days to do the drive at this rate :-(

I'm figuring that I will just have to tell the user that all their data is lost.

Or should I perservere.... the options I am thinking of are...

1) Wait patiently for a few days and see if somehow it starts moving faster?
2) Stop the TestDisk imaging process, and instead try and use PhotoRec (or will it be just as slow?)
3) Give up

Edit (17/4/2013):
I've just about given up on the drive now, but if anyone has any comments please feel free.

At some stage I found the TestDisk image create had stopped with the message saying no more space on destination (despite there being 100's of Gb free there). The image was 2Gb. I noted that the TestDisk version was not the most recent, so I downloaded the most recent version for further work.

I tried a bit more analysis and managed to get a listing of files. It showed that some signficant parts of the file system were no longer there (especially the Windows folder and the Users folder).

I decided to try ddrescue to image the disk. Tried various start points (10Gb, 20Gb and then 70Gb). At all points the data rate was very slow and the error rate very high, e.g. 50% data read errors.

In theory could run ddrescue for a long long time and get all the readable data off the disk. But then, with so many non readable sectors it doesn't seem worth it.

I'm wondering if a "professional" data recovery service would be able to do any better?

Thanks for your hard work and help for people!

Any advice appreciated.

Cheers,
Paul

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cgrenier
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Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 15:08
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Re: Very slow progress (2% after 24 hrs)

#2 Post by cgrenier »

"professional" data recovery service are also using ddrescue or similar tools when there are bad sectors. So the final clone should be identical/almost identical.

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