[ale] Extreme Practical Data Recovery (Part 2)

[ale at cogginsnet.com (Robert Coggins)]

So, this thread came at the perfect time. I am having to recover 
someone's laptop HDD here and it looks to be a mess.

I have been taking suggestions from the previous thread for recovering 
data.  PhotoRec is awesome and gddrescue is looking good too.  However, 
I wanted to know your experiences with ddrescue.  I know it can take 
days sometime to copy a drive depending on how bad the condition of the 
drive it.  But I was wondering.  What is typical?  Should I plan on 
keeping this drive and  computer I am recovering with out for a week or 
so?  Once it is past the bad sectors does the speed pick back up?

I am asking becuse this run at ddrescue has been running almost 24 hours 
now and I am at 3.5 gigs of 80.  I am hoping it will pick back up soon.

Another question.  My HDD problems seem to be at the beginning of the 
drive.  Is there a way to run photorec or something from the end of the 
drive?

Thanks for you input!

Robert