Been handed a dead hard drive and want to try and recover some of the data? That's the problem I had the other day. So I turned to some good old linux tools to try and recover the data. One of my favourite recovery tools is ddrescue. It works really well and given enough time can do a pretty solid job of data recovery - of course a better solution is proper backups but that's not always the way people go. Anyway, this is as much a note for myself but here is how to do some basic recovery using it:
sudo ddrescue -r 3 /dev/sde2 imaging loging
This images /dev/sed2 and produces the image file "imaging" with the log "logging".
To try and extract files you could use something like foremost
sudo foremost -w -i imaging -o /recovery/foremost
To make an audit of the files that can be recovered, recovering them with:
sudo foremost -i imaging -o /recovery/foremost2
