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I have an HDD with 2 partitions: 100GB unencrypted, unimportant data and 1,7TB encrypted (AES with TrueCrypt) important data. When I installed Windows 7 on another hard drive it wrote about 100MB on that drive which damaged it. (My post about that can be found here in case anybody has any further suggestions for recovery.)
Now I'd like to recover the 1,7TB of encrypted data. Before sending it to an expensive data center I'd like to try my luck with things such as TestCrypt.
Before doing so however I'd like to copy the damaged hard drive to another hard drive so that my attempts won't risk data loss.
For this purpose I've bought a 2nd HDD of the exact same size and type.
-> Now I'm not sure what the best way for this 1:1 copy would be: should I do a bit-to-bit copy, clone, image or mirror? (It should simply create the most identical copy possible.)
What program should I use? (Clonezilla maybe?)
Also note that I'd like to access the original HDD as few times as possible to avoid risk of data failure on the original hard drive as much as possible.
mYnDstrEAm
Posted 2015-11-23T10:52:26.700
Reputation: 297
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Possible duplicate of How do I recover lost/inacessible data from my storage device?
– DavidPostill – 2015-11-23T10:54:13.247@DavidPostill not sure why that looks like a duplicate of that question to you. This question is about how to copy the hard drive and which method to use for that - the question you posted is about data recovery. – mYnDstrEAm – 2015-11-23T10:56:44.980
You must have missed the bit in large bold letters in the answer which says "Take a backup (EASUS Disk Copy)." and has complete instructions on what to do. Note your question is also about data recovery "Now I'd like to recover the 1,7TB of encrypted data". Please take some time to read the duplicate properly. – DavidPostill – 2015-11-23T11:00:10.867
@DavidPostill does the EASUS Disk Copy work for copying the entire hard drive (1,8TB) to the 2nd hard drive of the exact same size? It's not a duplicate question but rather a question which happens to have been potentially answered elsewhere. Anyway, thanks for the link though, it's helpful. – mYnDstrEAm – 2015-11-23T11:04:22.400
1"This will copy the data exactly at a sector-by-sector level." – DavidPostill – 2015-11-23T11:06:00.180
Okay so I'll use that. Just wanting to make sure. – mYnDstrEAm – 2015-11-23T11:09:31.117
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Who knows if it is needed to do a sector by sector copy? I mean which are the info used by TrueCrypt? Did it uses the physical connection number of the HDD somehow? Did it uses the absolute sectors? Because if not maybe it's enough to copy the single partition. Did it uses the HDD serial number? because if yes and you are not able to change it, you need to spoof it or to do an image with those informations inside... With encryption things are used to be more complicated. First of all be sure Windows is not writing anymore on that HDD part.
– Hastur – 2015-11-23T11:24:17.850@Hastur: "Who knows if it is needed to do a sector by sector copy?" I don't, which is why I'm asking here. I don't think that it uses the physical connection number of the HDD but I don't know that either. Because of all of that I'm trying to keep my question as general as possible (e.g. which is the best way to go about this). I don't want to copy the single partition but the whole HDD. Got my HDD disconnected from my PC and would boot from the Ultimate Boot CD to do the mirroring with EASUS. – mYnDstrEAm – 2015-11-23T12:44:19.020
There are hundreds of tools that will duplicate a HDD sector by sector to another drive. We won't tell you which program to use for obvious reasons. We also cannot tell you if you should do this. – Ramhound – 2015-11-23T12:49:10.707
Same size and type is mistake. That will mean there won't be enough room to save everything on the old drive and still ensure that the backup is valid and legal. You should always use a larger drive that has enough room to store a complete image of the compromised drive after being formatted. – David Schwartz – 2015-11-23T13:19:07.920
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Read carefully this page of cgsecurity.org about TrueCrypt. Take more information you can on how to recover corrupted (or overwritten) TrueCrypt encrypted partition and do your attempts. Do not stop at the first problem. Post specific problem as new question or update this one. Do a (paper) logbook of each action you will do so that you can reproduce all...
– Hastur – 2015-11-23T14:58:33.697