ddrescue of HDD gone RAW - what next?

[duckspring]

Hi there,

I've been working for days on a corrupt windows NTFS 1TB Western Digital HDD, which went RAW a few weeks ago, and need some help...

the first attempt with ddrescue took almost a week:

ddrescue --force /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /mnt/logstick/ddrescue.log

link to the ddrescueviewer of the logfile
link to the logfile

I understand that the critical first sector is marked as corrupt, which makes the data recovery difficult.

I have no deeper experience in this field and the days of searching and reading the forums didn't really help either...

How should I proceed in attempting to get the maximum of my data back?

- Have a second run with ddrescue, with r3 to have triple readings of bad sectors?

- Which recovery programme is most promising? photorec, dmde, getdataback, recovermyfiles?

- Can anyone tell me about my chances, after having a look on the logfile..?

Thank you for answering, I really appreciate it.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, duckspring!

I'm sorry to hear about your data and the WD HDD going RAW on you! 🙁
However, I'd strongly recommend you to turn to a professional data recovery service. They are your best bet at getting your data back. I'd not proceed with the DIY attempts because they can potentially further the damage of the data on the drive.
I'd suggest you to check our Data Recovery Partners worldwide here and get in touch with one of them: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=5Ws3tM

Keeping my fingers crossed for your data! Best of luck!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[duckspring]

thanks for the link to the pro service, I'll keep it in mind.

Does anyone have a comment on the posted logfile? Should I try to recover the 1st sector with ddrescue? Appreciate any opinions!!!

 

[duckspring]

which recovery software can you recommend, r-recovery, DMDE, others..?

 

[TyrOd]

thanks for the link to the pro service, I'll keep it in mind.

Does anyone have a comment on the posted logfile? Should I try to recover the 1st sector with ddrescue? Appreciate any opinions!!!

I'd help but the links are broken.

I will say that if you have lots of bad/unreadable sectors there's a good chance that a head/heads are failing and that further read attempts will cause a more serious head crash, so be wary of that.

Properly imaging a drive with ddrescue requires many passes to minimize stress to the heads and further damage. Having the first pass take several days either means you had your setting too strict or the condition of the drive is very bad.

Of course the best course of action is always to get a free diagnostic done by a proper data recovery lab and evaluate the severity at that point.

WD has several partners that do free diagnostics, but ACE Data Recovery(datarecovery.net) seems to have the cleanest(most complete) data recovery from my experience and are the most transparent with the results.