disk copy

real_aurgathor

Does anyone know of any SW that could copy a hard disk sector-by-sector to an identical hard disk, regardless of whether the source disk is formatted or not?

I know that this might be a weird request -- what happened is that I have a 4 TB HDD with about 2 TB worth of data files on it that somehow got corrupted and now shows up as "raw". So I simply want to make a verbatim copy of that drive before trying to recover it.

Rich221976

I have used Ease US data recover software before.

https://www.easeus.com/ad/data-recovery-wizard.htm?source=dsa&gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAAD958NMJ1ZFIvJ7VaKkfzJMErfLmL&gclid=CjwKCAiAtsa9BhAKEiwAUZAszXUKtQtQKMBhEZ-41e2xbTuQVPROEh7aiNSJHFBqtnTxq_ECq1AnDRoC6cIQAvD_BwE

When I was in college, I tripped over the USB cable to a portable drive. Killed that drive badly. I ended up kicking it across the room and hit a wall. Main issue was that my Virtual Machines and all of my homework was on that drive. I had to recover the data fast. I honestly was about to send the drive off to a data recovery place.

The drive was not recognized at all. I used Windows, Mac, and even Linux. With no luck. I found this software and even though the drive wasn't recognized, it picked it up. I copied everything over to a new portable hard drive. I bought a drive for the broken portable drive and made sure I had a back up from then on. (I don't know why I didn't back it up in the first place). It even brought over all of my delete files as well.

I don't remember buying it, I think someone at college had a paid version that I "borrowed".

Jbob

Macrium Reflect(the last free version) has that capability. I'm pretty sure most Linux versions have the ability to copy sector by sector using command line. Not as familiar with *Nix but something with the DD command.

Also you might try a windows/DOS software known as "Test Disk" to see if you can repair that drive. I've used it several times for similar issues and was able to repair the drive to be usable again.

real_aurgathor

Jbob Also you might try a windows/DOS software known as "Test Disk" to see if you can repair that drive. I've used it several times for similar issues and was able to repair the drive to be usable again.

I already have some pieces of SW (i.e. GPARTED) that claim the capability to recover data from corrupted partitions. However, many (most?) of those will make changes to the partition, and if something doesn't work perfectly, that usually leads to either permanent, or harder to recover issues.

That's why I want to make a verbatim copy first -- that way I can get practically unlimited number of recovery attempts without worrying about possible data loss.

Somewhat-Reticent

Search using "clone disk" should find some tools for that.