I have an HDD with 2 partitions: 100GB unencrypted, unimportant data and 1,7TB encrypted (AES with TrueCrypt) important data. When I installed Windows 7 on another hard drive it wrote about 100MB on that drive which damaged it. (My post about that can be found here in case anybody has any further suggestions for recovery.)
Now I’d like to recover the 1,7TB of encrypted data. Before sending it to an expensive data center I’d like to try my luck with things such as TestCrypt.
Before doing so however I’d like to copy the damaged hard drive to another hard drive so that my attempts won’t risk data loss.
For this purpose I’ve bought a 2nd HDD of the exact same size and type.-> Now I’m not sure what the best way for this 1:1 copy would be: should I do a bit-to-bit copy, clone, image or mirror? (It should simply create the most identical copy possible.)
What program should I use? (Clonezilla maybe?)
Also note that I’d like to access the original HDD as few times as possible to avoid risk of data failure on the original hard drive as much as possible.
Answer
If your disk is damaged, you should avoid to use it before making sure you saved what can be saved.
So the best way is to use a live CD, I would recommend SystemRescueCd. This system contain a tool designed to save what can be saved from you disk: ddrescure
This tool is designed to get the most out of your damage disk. See https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html#Examples for most common examples.
Once your data is saved, go ahead with reinstalling, etc.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : mYnDstrEAm , Answer Author : alci
