How to recover data from a damaged external drive?

Question

Is it possible to recover data from a damaged external drive? My external drive was not recognized by my computers and after a computer engineer examined it, I was told the drive is damaged.

He claimed to have been able to view some of the files on the drive, but that they are damaged. How do I recover my files from this drive?

What file system was on the drive? Please provide enough information so that we can answer properly. — Andrea Lazzarotto, Jun 20 '17 at 11:40
I had good luck with testdisk as referenced in the duplicate candidate above. — WinEunuuchs2Unix, Jun 25 '17 at 00:19

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 19 '17 at 14:55

0

you need 3 things:

clonezilla http://clonezilla.org/

extundelete available n the repo

and a good drive.

use clonezilla to do a sector by sect clone of the drive. this will copy all that can be copied to the new drive.

run extundelete on the new drive.

see what data you have recovered.

answered Jun 19 '17 at 14:55

ravery

6,874

OP never mentioned that the file system is ext. – Andrea Lazzarotto Jun 20 '17 at 11:39
@Anrea true, but clonezilla will work on any fs, and prevent further loss – ravery Jun 20 '17 at 11:46
I honestly don't remember perfectly, but didn't Clonezilla only copy allocated sectors and apply compression? Wouldn't maybe ddrescue be a better tool to clone it thoroughly? – Andrea Lazzarotto Jun 20 '17 at 11:58
it can copy disk to disk, partition to partiton, and do a raw sector by sector clone. – ravery Jun 20 '17 at 12:07

How to recover data from a damaged external drive?

1 Answers1