Best free data recovery Software for corrupted drive?

[Frazman00]

Hi all,

 

I have a corrupted hard drive, but i know that it still has data on it, because I used recuva to get some stuff off of it (mainly pictures). I know there's more stuff on it, because I used m3 data recovery tool, and it showed me what was in it, but you have to pay $70 after the first 1gb of data recovered... so i was wondering what the best FREE alternative to m3datarecovery tool would be, as i want to get everything off of the drive.

 

Thanks in advance!

[PorkishPig]

I use a Debian application called ddrescue, which you can learn more about here. It requires some patients, but it will successfully recover a majority of your lost files. Ddrescue comes bundled with drive-cloning software called Clonezilla, which runs a Debian Linux instance independently from your OS on a flash drive or other bootable media.

 

To setup Clonezilla, follow these steps:

1. Download and install Linux Live USB Creator from here.
2. Download the stable ISO of Clonezilla Live from here.
3. Follow the visual steps listed here.
4. Boot into the USB Flash Drive.

Once booted into Clonezilla, you can utilize ddrescue by entering Clonezilla's shell (ctrl+alt+f2) and using the following command:

ddrescue -f -n /dev/source /dev/newdrive /root/recovery.log

Please note that utilizing this command will wipe the drive you are copying recovered data to.

 

In this case, replace the "/dev/source" with the bad drive, and "/dev/newdrive" with the drive you will be copying recovered data to. You can view the drives currently connected to your computer with the following command:

fdisk

In the end, the command should look something similar to this:

ddrescue -f -n /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 /root/recovery.log

This process may take anywhere from hours to days, depending on the speeds of the drives being utilized and the number of bad sectors.

[Frazman00]

2 hours ago, Homeless Pineapple said:

I use a Debian application called ddrescue, which you can learn more about here. It requires some patients, but it will successfully recover a majority of your lost files. Ddrescue comes bundled with drive-cloning software called Clonezilla, which runs a Debian Linux instance independently from your OS on a flash drive or other bootable media.

 

To setup Clonezilla, follow these steps:

1. Download and install Linux Live USB Creator from here.
2. Download the stable ISO of Clonezilla Live from here.
3. Follow the visual steps listed here.
4. Boot into the USB Flash Drive.

Once booted into Clonezilla, you can utilize ddrescue by entering Clonezilla's shell (ctrl+alt+f2) and using the following command:

ddrescue -f -n /dev/source /dev/newdrive /root/recovery.log

Please note that utilizing this command will wipe the drive you are copying recovered data to.

 

In this case, replace the "/dev/source" with the bad drive, and "/dev/newdrive" with the drive you will be copying recovered data to. You can view the drives currently connected to your computer with the following command:

fdisk

In the end, the command should look something similar to this:

ddrescue -f -n /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 /root/recovery.log

This process may take anywhere from hours to days, depending on the speeds of the drives being utilized and the number of bad sectors.

Thank you for your reply.

I do have an ubuntu boot usb, but was looking for something within windows... something like the r-studio mentioned in Linus' most recent video? he mentioned free alternatives, but I cant see any with similar functionality.

[PorkishPig]

18 hours ago, Frazman00 said:

Thank you for your reply.

I do have an ubuntu boot usb, but was looking for something within windows... something like the r-studio mentioned in Linus' most recent video? he mentioned free alternatives, but I cant see any with similar functionality.

3

There are not any free alternatives for Windows that I am aware of. Most of the reliable recovery software uses some sort of Linux distro.

[Frazman00]

4 hours ago, Homeless Pineapple said:

There are not any free alternatives for Windows that I am aware of. Most of the reliable recovery software uses some sort of Linux distro.

I found a software called DMDE, which has a fairly unrestricted free version, and was able to restore 120GB of photos etc off my drive! drive is still corrupted, but at least most of the stuff is saved!

 

EDIT: didn't want to do this until i recovered stuff, but followed this, and now i have access to the drive - there's only 500MB available (there was like 120GB+ originally, but most of that was recovered using other tools, and now I have access to the drive through windows... would have liked to get it all back to where it was but at least i got most of it

 

Thanks everyone for all your assistance - I really appreciate it!!!