I have a drive that both windows and linux recognize as a raw unknown MBR partition. Other than that I do not know what is wrong. I dont know if its bad sectors, bad servo sectors, bad mft, bad partition table, surface damage, or mechanical. I dont know what is corrupted. I have started with non data destructive tools such as testdisk and photorec but both failed. Testdisk did not find my lost partition and photorec returned no files found. I tried gparted and that gave me an io error.
I then tried ddrescue. I tried cloning the drive and creating a disk image both returned an io error with 0 bytes processed.
So my question is what do I do next? Do I do a quick format so it will hopefully be in a readable state with hopefully most of the data intact and run these tools against it again ? Or do I try repair tools like seatools or HDD regenerator or ckdsk? I hear HDD regenerator is a head killer especially if the drive is already weak. I hear chkdsk is bad because it attempts to repair and changes the data on the drive weather or not that change in data worked or not its going to stay what it is now and that can potentially make it much harder to recover data, same situation with seatools.
Any advice to help me through my naivety would be much appreciated.
- Kirt
I then tried ddrescue. I tried cloning the drive and creating a disk image both returned an io error with 0 bytes processed.
So my question is what do I do next? Do I do a quick format so it will hopefully be in a readable state with hopefully most of the data intact and run these tools against it again ? Or do I try repair tools like seatools or HDD regenerator or ckdsk? I hear HDD regenerator is a head killer especially if the drive is already weak. I hear chkdsk is bad because it attempts to repair and changes the data on the drive weather or not that change in data worked or not its going to stay what it is now and that can potentially make it much harder to recover data, same situation with seatools.
Any advice to help me through my naivety would be much appreciated.
- Kirt