Comparison between file carving from disk drive and disk image in open source environment

The file carving is one of the methods in data recovery from corrupted or damaged hard disk drives(HDD). Numerous open source commercial tools with different features are available in the market. In the present work an attempt was made for file carving with two different methods: 1) File carving from hard disk drive directly and 2) File carving from disk image. In this investigation the file carving tool PhotoRec and disk imaging tools such as Gddrescue, safecopy were used. Quiet a significant improvement in data recovery was found in case of file carving from disk image method. All most 1GB more data was resulted in file carving through disk image when compared with that of targeted HDD directly.