data rescue with ddrescue and TestDisk....PLEASE HELP!!!

[cmd947]

Hi guys

I urgently need help recovering data from a failed 2TB Lacie Quadra Harddrive, I have been struggling for over a month now.....i'll try to explain the situation as best i can.

The drive was practically brand new.......but i had already copied very valuable information onto it when it failed i have backups of most except for a view projects that i really really need back!!!!

I am working on a MacPro running Snow Leopard 10.6.8, the drive has two partitions an HFS+ and FAT32 partition.

I am only interested in recovering the HFS+ partition since it has most of the data.

It unmounted suddenly the remounted again and then it was gone!!!!!! I can see it in disk utility
and i have used GNU ddrescue to make a copy on another 2TB Lacie.

The commands i used were as follows.

ddrescue -f -n /dev/disk1 /dev/disk2 rescued.log (to get of the blocks that are still good)

ddrescue -C -f -r3 /dev/rdisk1 /dev/rdisk2 rescued.log (to get the rest)

at the end it seemed that roughly 10400kB was not recoverable. When ddrescue stopped it gave me a message saying that there was not enough space on the disk left even though both of these drives are identical!?!?!

I also used this command to disable access from the mounting point - chflags uchg /Volumes

I then scanned the healthy drive with testdisk but it gave me the following error - the harddisk seems to be too small? and stated that the partition was not recoverable.

I apologize for not having any screenshots.

If anyone can please help me i would greatly appreciate it!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Fishrrman]

Have you tried any of the "commercial" data recovery apps, such as
- DataRescue3
- Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery
- Disk Drill
???

If they can mount and "see" the damaged partition, and "see" the files, you then pay the registration fee, get a code, enter it, and get your data back.

LAST RESORT when NOTHING ELSE works:
- Re-initialize the ENTIRE drive into ONE partition using Disk Utility. (Note: do not, repeat DO NOT, choose to "zero out" the drive if you decide to do this)
- Now, use one of the data recovery apps mentioned above to "get at" the data
- Remember that re-initializing a drive only "wipes" the drive's directory, and NOT the actual data on the drive (unless you zero-ed it out, see above).
- Once you re-initialize, you will now have a "mountable" drive that your data recovery apps can see and access.

You WILL need ANOTHER "scratch drive" to which to recover your data.

You WILL lose all previous folder hierarchies, and perhaps file names as well. Nothing to be done about that -- just smile if you get the data back.