Help need to recover data from drive " uninitialized"
- Thread starter epicurean
- Start date
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A former flatmate used to work for a data recovery firm (mostly forensic work for legal cases but did personal recoveries as well), ddrescue and photorec and friends were indeed the bread and butter of their business - and I think because they charged per GB recovered, it was basically a license to print money. Thankfully they did have coders writing some custom gubbins and did contribute code back to the open source projects (they didn't have to since they weren't distributing the resulting code).
The work they did on physical media repair was pretty impressive though - they kept stacks of hundreds of different types of HDD controller boards, clean rooms in case platters needed to be transplanted in to other drives, all manner of stuff for repairing LTO tapes, hundreds of different tape, floppy and optical drives (many of them using custom firmware or hacked controllers to assist with data recovery). Brand new in was a colossally expensive pile of kit whereupon you could de-solder flash chips from SSDs and there was I think an FPGA that could emulate SSD controllers to extract the data.
As an aside, anyone who tells you a hard drive needs overwriting at least seven times with cryptographically random data is wrong. A single overwrite from /dev/zero is easily enough to render the original data completely unreadable. You're liable to only get data out of reallocated sectors.
The message to me is always clear - it's much, much cheaper to pay for a good backup strategy than it is to ever engage a recovery specialist
If you really attract the attention from glowing in the dark types, only one option is suitable:
For the last seven years I've only ever used LUKS-encrypted drives, so rendering them completely unreadable is just a matter of deleting the relevant key ... makes for much better rates on the second hand market than the above HDDslaw
I connected the faulty drive directly via the sata port. I prepare a similar 5TB drive in another sata port ( to do the cloning) and that drive showed up fine.
sorry, but I still need help! much thanks.
Well, I was referring more to the idea of buying those overpriced "recovery software" (often shrilled by fake review or help sites) rather than actual data recovery shops.A former flatmate used to work for a data recovery firm (mostly forensic work for legal cases but did personal recoveries as well), ddrescue and photorec and friends were indeed the bread and butter of their business - and I think because they charged per GB recovered, it was basically a license to print money. Thankfully they did have coders writing some custom gubbins and did contribute code back to the open source projects (they didn't have to since they weren't distributing the resulting code).
The work they did on physical media repair was pretty impressive though - they kept stacks of hundreds of different types of HDD controller boards, clean rooms in case platters needed to be transplanted in to other drives, all manner of stuff for repairing LTO tapes, hundreds of different tape, floppy and optical drives (many of them using custom firmware or hacked controllers to assist with data recovery). Brand new in was a colossally expensive pile of kit whereupon you could de-solder flash chips from SSDs and there was I think an FPGA that could emulate SSD controllers to extract the data.
As an aside, anyone who tells you a hard drive needs overwriting at least seven times with cryptographically random data is wrong. A single overwrite from /dev/zero is easily enough to render the original data completely unreadable. You're liable to only get data out of reallocated sectors.
The message to me is always clear - it's much, much cheaper to pay for a good backup strategy than it is to ever engage a recovery specialist
Most of those apps are essentially like running photorec/testdisk (really variants of the same tool) or ddrescue to grab your data back. Yeah, physical media repair shops do keep multiple drive controller boards (off common drives) and have clean-rooms to swap platters and servos in some rare cases. If someone is willing to go as far as to delve into component level diagnostics to get some data back, then the payoff must justify the investments.
Okay, so the question now is whether the drive is legitimately dead (it could happen - even if it spins up it can still be deader than a doornail) or if the software environment is simply not seeing it.
Which OS have you tried so far? Only Windows or did you tried booting it up onto Linux via something like partedmagic and see if it'll detect a drive connected? The thing to look for is:
a) Is the drive drawing power?
b) Does the drive show up on dmesg?
c) Does the drive ask you to initialize and/or format it, or it doesn't even bother?
d) Have you tried a SATA to USB adapter?