cgsecurity.org

Hi there,
I am using Testdisk on a new (good) hard drive in order to create an image of an old (bad) hard drive, my external WD My Passport 4TB, that got corrupted by Windows and is now only showing up as local disk, unknown partition.
How long does it usually take to create an image? Testdisk rests at 55% since 6 hours now.

Before I started the image creation, I tried to recover the disk using analyse, quick search, deeper search but then decided to stop and creating an image in order not to stress the disk too much.

I also tried Ubuntu Live USB in order to use ddrescue but I could not make it work. Namely it asks super user rights and in order to activate them I would need to restart the live session. I also tried Testdisk in Ubuntu but could not figure out how to choose the new external harddrive for the image.dd

So to sum up, I read a lot and understood, that it would have been better to create the image first and later on run the Analyse and Deeper Search. But is there any chance that the image creation completes, should I stop it or should I wait another day?

Thanks for your support,
best regards,
Chris

You really should use ddrescue. Do not forget to use a log file as it's is very useful to resume the clone operation.

Thanks for the prompt reply. I will try to make ddrescue work...

I stopped the Image creation and just tried to open it for curiosity, by choosing right click open with Testdisk. And, wow, maybe it worked. I clicked on Advanced and was able to Rebuild the BS. Now it says Partition ExFAT: Ok. Bootsector: Ok.
I am just running the Quick Search and will see if I might be able to copy some important files or try to click Write. And then restart.

I any case, I found this tutorial on how to run DDrescue on Windows as I am not so familiar with Ubuntu: https://www.hamishmb.com/blog/tutorial- ... th-cygwin/