Data Recovery raw disc

WingedWeasel

So my friend threw his laptop against a wall. We are trying to recover data on his potentially damaged hard drive. We are using ubuntu live cd to try and salvage a drive using test disc. The issue with the drive is when it is connected via external enclosure it shows up as raw instead of formatted. Are there any other free options? I've looked at Recova but I wanted to see what other option I had to try and recover the data.

Djeet

Try photorec for file recovery and anger management for your friend.

WingedWeasel

Djeet wrote: »

Try photorec for file recovery and anger management for your friend.

thanks. i'll give it a shot, the seems to see the drive so hopefully things are salvagable.

Draygo

I have had the best results with photorec if I couldn't salvage the drive with testdisk. A drive showing up as raw should be repairable with testdisk is it even finding the partition when it scans?

WingedWeasel

sort of a necro, but i missed @Draygo‌ 's response and i figured i'd at least give an update. bunch of real life things prevented me from really looking at the drive all that much. i ended up running both testdisk and photorec. unfortunately it couldn't recover the partitions, but could see the file structure. after attempting to copy everything i could off the drive, i basically got just the windows file structure but a bunch of empty folders.

kept coming back that the files were corrupt. i am going to try a couple of other things to see if maybe there is a chance at salvaging anything but i think it is shot at this point. he mentioned windows updates when he first handed everything over so i can only guess that they didn't finish and ruined some important files.

Djeet

You could try Find and Mount. Found it last week when photorec wasn't doing the job. Be aware the free version is capped at 512 KBytes/sec recovery so it took days.

WingedWeasel

thanks @djeet thanks. i'll take a look