[18:08] <DammitJim> anyone here have experience with a place that can recover hard drive data?
[18:12] <mhall119> DammitJim: not a place, but I've used the photorec tool to recover files from failing drives many times
[18:12] <DammitJim> photorec?
[18:12] <DammitJim> I"m creating an image with ddrescue
[18:12] <mhall119> DammitJim: it's part of the testdisk package in Ubuntu
[18:13] <DammitJim> but I don't think I have enough room on this hard drive
[18:13] <mhall119> it'll recover images from a disk image
[18:13] <mhall119> do you have another drive you can recover files to?
[18:13] <DammitJim> yeah, about that... I tried using ubuntu-rescue-remix, but couldn't create a usb drive to run it
[18:13] <DammitJim> this hard drive is 2TB
[18:13] <mhall119> never heard of that remix before
[18:13] <DammitJim> I'll need something larger than that
[18:13] <mhall119> how much data was on it?
[18:13] <DammitJim> not much... maybe 50GB
[18:14] <mhall119> it's recommended to use dd to create an image file of the drive, but if you don't have space for that it's not strictly necessary, you just need space to put the recovered files
[18:14] <DammitJim> yeah, I'm just afraid I'll mess up the drive even more
[18:14] <mhall119> it's good practice to use dd to create an image, because every time you access a failing drive you can potentially destroy data
[18:14] <DammitJim> then we send it to a recovery place and they say they can't get anything back
[18:15] <DammitJim> right mhall119 ... that's my fear
[18:15] <mhall119> but, if you don't have any better options, you can still give that a try
[18:15] <mhall119> if the drive is working enough to be read at least