My hard disk of my main machine crashed on 8/9. Had most of
the data on this drive. I had to now recover a bitlocker encrypted crashed 1TB
hard disk.
After a LOT of experimenting and frustrated hours, I could recover
most of the data back (I got all the data I cared about).
Here are the steps I took to recover the data:
- Remove the crashed hard disk from the machine
- DO not run test disk or check disk or try to unlock the drive through the UI. Any of these actions will damage the hard disk further & reduce the chances of recovering data
- Put the hard disk in a ziplock & stick in the freezer for a couple of hrs (sounds ridiculous but works)
- Get a SATA to USB cable so that you can let the hard disk breathe or you can cool it with an external fan. I bought this one, it was DOA (Dead on arrival) did not help.
- I got a new 3TB hard disk, had to install Intel Rapid storage technology software for windows to detect any HD > 1TB
- Use SystemRescue CD, a live CD linux distribution which has the awesome tool ddrescue
- Copy the whole hard disk image into another working hard disk (mine was a 3TB hard disk). This process takes ~6 hrs because it tries to copy the whole image. At the end of this I had a ~1TB .img file (ddrescue /corrupted drive /good drive log.txt -r 3).The no. of retries is 3.
- Boot back into windows & use repair-bde to recover the bitlockered data
- This takes a couple of hrs & creates another .img file which should have your data. J
