(14-06-2025, 04:03 PM)king1 Wrote: this is my goto for absolutely stuffed drives
https://www.hddsuperclone.com/
I use the livecd and usually clone to another connected drive, it can save progress for restarting and uses three or four different methods for scraping data off bad sectors... on a really bad drive i did a while back which windows wouldn't even fire up it took 48 hours plus but managed to get the majority of the data off.
One i did Thursday trying to recover the thunderbird data that couldn't be copied (300 odd bad sectors), it took about 8 hours to get the clone which then allowed me to copy off the thunderbird data completely...
(14-06-2025, 07:39 PM)nzoomed Wrote: Yeah, i usually find linux does it better.
I think with this drive it might be one of those instances where you need to desolder a particular component off the board and presto, it all works again, seen a few videos on this in the past.
In this case this drive contains all the 2FA data stored in session with chrome for a google account, i cant log back into the account on another device because the user never updated his contact information and the 2FA code gets sent to his old phone number.
I have seen a similar utility called open super clone, which im guessing is a fully open source alternative.
Those look like good utilities! I had not heard of them before, thanks.
Normally I have used gnu ddrescue for this kind of task.
I guess the removed component is probably a shorted ceramic capacitor, usually there is enough on the board in parallel if one fails you can remove it without affecting stability. Easier than a head-swap but finding which one is bad can be a fun time...