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Hard disk clone prior to data recovery

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simonhopkin

Technical User
Apr 4, 2007
1
GB
Hi,

Does anyone know of some hardware which can be used to clone a hard disk so that data recovery can be conducted on the cloned disk rather than the damaged source disk. The hardware must be able to copy from a source disk that may have logical problems or physically damaged sectors.

Cheers
Simon
 
there are cradles that have write blockers that can do what you ask but the key is the software not hardware.

why not just clone it to a slave drive using any bit image copying software, i.e. Winhex?
 
Here is the drive imaging device designed specifically for data recovery, i.e. to retrieve bad sectors, handle drive instability issues, such as occasional hang-ups or clicks, etc.: Software imaging tools will not be able to handle those issues. You have to have a hardware unit.

Should you be interested in deeper knowledge about problems an imaging tool has to handle in data recovery read this:
P.S.: Write blockers have nothing to do with data recovery cloning/imaging. All these devices do is just protect the drive from rewriting data on the device and nothing else.
 
ICS tools, such as ImageMasster product line, are not designed for data recovery... They don't retrieve data from bad sectors, can't preconfigure the drive under recovery so that it doesn't die during the imaging process, can't skip problematic sectors that take too long time to process, can't process sectors with different errors (e.g. UNC, ABORT, AMNF or IDNF error) differently, can't read in multiple passes trying to retrieve some sectors that were not read in a previous pass, etc.

As I mentioned earlier should you be interested in deeper knowledge about what data recovery cloning/imaging tool should do read this:
 
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