File recovery

[tommy2k10]

Hi

I am trying to recover some files from a 1TB WD external drive for a friend of mine. Photorec has been going since Saturday, has recovered 161 files, and says its got 5400 hours to go. Is there any way to speed it up? That seems an awful long time.

[recuperation]

First you should have checked the SMART status of your disk.
Looking at the result would have led you to the decision to clone your disk using ddrescue as described in the manual.
Currently you are stressing your assumably defective disk which might lead to further deterioration and may be preventing you from cloning it at a later time.

Using ddrescue has the advantage that you could run PhotoRec against the copy target while ddrescue would continue trying to read sectors.
PhotoRec has not been designed with working on broken disks.
Ddrescue though is trying to avoid broken areas of the disk to extract the readable portions in a minimum of time.

Unreadable sectors will slow down PhotoRec.

[tommy2k10]

Ubuntu (which I am using) doesn't recognise the disk when I automatically plug it in via USB, but Disk Utility does, but unfortunately the SMART options are greyed out for some reason.
The files found so far are intact, I have checked them by opening them.
Would it hurt to stop the process with Photorec, and use DDrescue?

[tommy2k10]

I have started ddrescue, and am cloning the disk onto one of the formatted external drives I have got.
Thankyou for the information about ddrescue!

[tommy2k10]

I have cloned the Poor Health 1TB external drive (although no bad sectors) onto a blank 2TB external drive using DDRescue, and this is the output:

IPOS: 870814MB
OPOS: 870814MB
Non-tried: 428761MB
Rescued: 571377MB
Percent rescued: 57.2%
Non-trimmed: 31180kB
Non-scraped: 0B
Bad-sector: 0B
Bad areas: 0
Read errors: 632
Current rate: 0B/s
Average rate: 5259kB/s
Error rate: 167kB/s
Run time: 1d 6h 16m
Remaining time: n/a
Time since last remaining read: 5h 18m 2s
Copying non-tried blocks... Pass 2 (Backwards)

What do I do now and how do I access the recovered files?

[recuperation]

You start TestDisk to see if it finds a partition table. If so you try to look into the partitions using TestDisk. You could then copy files to another healthy disk.
If that fails you can use a data rescue program of your choice to see how well it performs.
If using your data rescue program fails you are left with PhotoRec.

But I assume all this will more or less fail due to your lack of patience - well documented by the ddrescue summary!

[spoidy23]

Hi Tommy, good job cloning the drive with ddrescue! After that, you can try using TestDisk to check if it finds any partitions. If it does, you can copy the files to a safe drive. If not, you can try other recovery tools like R-Studio or EaseUS Data Recovery to see if they work better. Just make sure you’re not using the original drive anymore to avoid causing more damage.

[tommy2k10]

Thankyou! I was quite surprised that it worked!
I have finished the job now, and, even though it still took a bit of time, it recovered the majority of the files, so thankyou for your advice!