Recovering data from RAW image of a dying hard disk

Question

My 1TB Seagate hard disk stopped working few days ago. I was trying to backup the data as much as possible. But after copying nearly 100GB, the NTFS drives become RAW drives.

I tried many software (TestDisk, Recuva, MiniTool Partition, Easeus) to recover the drives but none was successful. Following are the steps that I took further:

1. I reached a program named "GetData Forensic Imager". I was successful in making a clone of the RAW drive. Now I have image of one of the partitions on my dying drive. (It made "drive.001", "drive.002"... files)

2. After that, I mounted the "drive.001" file using "OSFMount". The properties say that Used Space: 0 bytes and Free Space is also 0 bytes.

3. Now I tried to recover data using "RecoverMyFiles" software. And surprisingly, this software found all my files.

But unfortunately, this program is very expensive. Is there any other way or freeware by which I can get my data back?

Broadly speaking, my question is:

How to get data back from a Raw Image of drive?

Answer 1

A RAW image can be read by most serious data recovery tools. In professional data recovery, creation of a raw image file is the first thing to work towards. Many of the pro data recovery hardware imagers do just one thing: keep an unstable disk alive by stressing it as little as possible while creating a sector-by-sector image. Once we have the image the original drive no longer has to be stressed.

Logical file recovery is a next step and therefor most of the file recovery software, at least the ones you'll see frequently used in data recovery labs (ReclaiMe Pro, R-Studio, UFS Explorer) can process raw image files. The pro versions of these are expensive, the end user version will work too most of the time.

Have a look at DMDE (www.dmde.com): Also used by many professional labs I know and end user version is only $20 (one year license). It's development is a pace slower than other tools I mentioned but at it's current stage it's already an awesome tool which supports most current file systems and raw file recovery.