Need advice for cloning a physically damaged hard drive

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Sparktown

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Jan 28, 2015
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I'm fairly computer savvy, but I don't have a lot of experience with data recovery, so I wanted to get some general advice before I attempted this.

My laptop got knocked off a table. Now the computer doesn't recognize the hard drive and I can hear a faint clicking when I try to boot.

I got a new hard drive (with more capacity than the old drive) and an external USB enclosure for it. Ideally, I would like to clone the damaged drive to the new drive. Then just swap the new hard drive in and everything would be as good as new. If I couldn't do a full clone, I would at least like to copy the photographs and documents from the damaged drive.

I realize that is a long shot, but the drive isn't critical enough to pay the obscene amount for professional data recover.

I'm interested in any advice I can get before I try this. I want to do the best I can on the first try, since (as I understand it) attempting further reads on the damaged drive will likely only make it harder recover data.

My current plan is to attempt a full clone with DDrescue loaded on a bootable USB drive. Is there better alternative software for my situation? Should I put the new undamaged drive in the laptop and the old damaged drive in the USB enclosure? Does it matter? Should I try putting in the damaged drive in the freezer beforehand? Am I better off trying to get the important data (documents and photos) off before I try to clone? What is the best way to go about that? Is there anything I'm missing here that I should check or do with the damaged drive? Thanks!
 
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sbgardne
Drive recovery services are painfully expensive. The only time I used one, I was charged ~$1700 to inspect my drive, which wouldn't hum or click when powered up. The service worked on my drive in a "clean room," replaced the motor, spun the drive, and sent me back the old drive's contents on a separate drive for about $2000, all in. If you've got irreplaceable files-- baby pictures, videos, manuscripts-- this may be your only option to get your data back.

If your drive still spins and you want to try yourself, do everything you can to clone the damaged hard drive-- if you're lucky, it may still have enough spins left in it to complete a clone. Ideally clone the drive to an SSD to speed up the potential recovery. Remove the drive and...
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velocityg4

velocityg4

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Assuming the drive works at all. Don't mess with it any further. Forget about cloning.

Get your new drive setup and OS installed. Connect your old drive and start pulling your most important files off. Then get other files. You'll just have to reinstall apps and set new settings.

This time. Buy a second drive and keep a backup.
 
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Sparktown

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Jan 28, 2015
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Thanks. Is there any additional software I should be looking at that might help me pull data off the drive if the file system has trouble mounting or reading the drive?

 
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velocityg4

velocityg4

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I used to use Nucleus Kernel on Windows and Stellar Phoenix for Mac. As they did a deeper scan than most. They could also scan if no partition map was found. Many others could only scan if they could identify partitions.

I could not say if they are still the best. I stopped doing data recovery. The failure rate is too high.

Data recovery software is only really useful for soft recovery. Such as user error like an accidentally deleted file or formatted drive. It’s also useful when some glitch causes a corruption in the partition map.

In my experience. If the hardware is damaged. At best you’ll waste your time. At worst you’ll make the damage worse. It will take a long time. You’ll see a bunch of files. You may even recover a few. Most will be empty or corrupt.
 
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sbgardne

sbgardne

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Drive recovery services are painfully expensive. The only time I used one, I was charged ~$1700 to inspect my drive, which wouldn't hum or click when powered up. The service worked on my drive in a "clean room," replaced the motor, spun the drive, and sent me back the old drive's contents on a separate drive for about $2000, all in. If you've got irreplaceable files-- baby pictures, videos, manuscripts-- this may be your only option to get your data back.

If your drive still spins and you want to try yourself, do everything you can to clone the damaged hard drive-- if you're lucky, it may still have enough spins left in it to complete a clone. Ideally clone the drive to an SSD to speed up the potential recovery. Remove the drive and mount it in a case that supports multiple SATA connections. Also mount the SSD and clone your HD to the SSD using the fastest SATA ports and connections you can find-- remember some older systems only support SATA II and have cables that are rated for SATA II; SATA III is faster, and there may be a limited number of spins left in your old drive. You may need to babysit the cloning process, pressing "Ignore" or "Retry" multiple times to complete the process.

For cloning software, I've had really good luck cloning drives using Acronis TrueImage. When dealing with a failed/failing HD, allow Acronis to try to copy everything to the SSD, bad sectors and all. You can then attempt chkdsk /f (and all other repairs) on the clone using your preferred data recovery tools. Data Recovery takes a LONG time, and it might take several passes to find a readable MFT and recoverable files-- that's another reason to try recovery on an SSD clone rather than on a slower mechanical drive.

I've had very good luck recovering files and partitions using products from RunTime software like Captain Nemo, GetDataBack, and RAID Reconstructor. Runtime offers working software for download, and offers discounted pricing when you buy a bundle of tools, rather than a single tool a la carte. These tools can recover deleted files and partitions, and can sometimes get data back from your system's RECOVERY volume if you enabled system protection.

No lectures on the importance of backup here, other than to say: once you've paid someone else to recover your data, you'll never want it to happen again. Good luck!
 
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