Data recovery attempt using TestDisk

Hello forum,

I am attempting to restore lost data from an 80GB hard drive. Since I don't really want to deal with the lost data right now, I'd rather just image the drive and store it on my 350GB hard drive.

I used the dd command to duplicate the drive to 80GB.iso. Strangely, I get different results between the drives when using TestDisk.

On the physical drive, testdisk finds several lost partitions. On 80GB.iso it only finds a few. What explains the difference between these results? I am worried that the image of the hard drive won't be as good as the original.

Going to give this advice a whack. Chrisophe is the main contributer to TestDisk.

Christophe GRENIER <grenier@.org> to me

On Mon, 7 May 2007, Steve wrote:

> Hello and please forgive me if I am violating list rules.
>
> I am wondering if there is any obvious answer to why running TestDisk
> on a physical drive will yield lost partitions (using Search!),
> whereas running TestDisk on an image (dd if=/dev/hda of=image.iso)
> yields no such lost partitions?

You may have to change the geometry (menu Geometry).

> I was hoping to simply image my failing drive and worry about data
> recovery later, but the fact that my image yields no lost partitions
> makes me somewhat paranoid. Yet everything I read about dd tells me
> the image should be 'forensically identical'.

If there are bad sectors, the option "conv=noerror" must be used.

Christophe

Thanks for posting your update, helps anyone else with the same issue.

Total and utter success.

Full explanation here: http://yeago.net/works/obligatory-l...e-recovery-post