Re: [Bug-ddrescue] Questions on recovering OS X laptop SATA disk with Linux box or external SATA-to-USB adaptor

[andrew zajac]

address@hidden wrote:
> The day before yesterday, it suddenly failed and now is completely unusable, it makes a repetitive clicking sound. It sounds exactly like this..
> http://www.datarecovery-on.com/sounds/clicking_drive.mp3
It sounds like a hardware problem which no software will be able to overcome.  I presume the drive does not show up in the bios?

> I have heard that when you recover a SATA drive, its better to use a motherboard-based SATA connection, it being more direct. .. is that true? My other option to connect it is the external SATA-to-USB adaptor.
The USB adpter can slow things down considerably.  It's not *bad*, just slower.
> Also, is there a good LiveCD (or DVD) that has a recent version of ddrescue on it as well as a good complement of other tools? Is there something like knoppix that has ddrescue on it, or is it common to simlply compile ddrescue (I could do it on my flash drive) at the time of use..
http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/

The latest 8.04 version is still alpha, but works fine.  The version of ddrescue on the live system is still 1.2, but the 1.8 version is available by running

sudo apt-get install gddrescue 

once you boot into it.  You must be connected to the internet at the time.

The next release (8.04 Beta) will ship with version 1.8 of Gnu ddrescue.  That will happen in a week or so.

> Would that be a
>  good way to recover the OS X disk using the Linux box? (then I could in esence setup a dedicated recovery system temporarily, by disconnecting the currently connected drives - eliminating any risk of file corruption, and write to the empty external drive only?)
Yes.
> When I recover the drive, on whatever platform, if it turns out that I can extract data, should I image the whole drive at once or partition by partition, (assuming I can get the partition map) What options to ddrescue would you use?
It doesn't matter.  You can mount the various partitions on the recovered image if you rescue the whole thing as one file.
> Anyway, given the hardware I have and the problem, what do you think makes the most
>  sense? What would you do? 
>
> And, finally, I have also heard that sometimes hard drives work again briefly if they are frozen. Would it make sense to try to freeze it in a bag or is it really stupid? If the first attempt doesnt deliver anything, should I just give up. 
Put it in the freezer, it shouldn't make it any worse.  If it doesn't show signs of life, your options are pretty much to give up anyway and send it to someone who can deal with hardware issues.

Good Luck

Andrew Zajac

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