HD took a huge fall; Recovering DATA on a drive that freezes my system

Drive is a 1TB caviar green from a gateway computer that took a dive from the top of a desk while running. This drive is shot to an extreme degree. I'm trying to rescue as many pictures as I can, as the owner's family photos were not backed up so I'm doing all I can to save the day.

I am using a SATA to USB converter to access the drive. I was able to navigate to the pictures folder, although it took a long time to show the files, in fact every click I make using this drive takes a very long time. First I tried to do a large copy (10GB) of the pictures folder, but once it hits a problem file it will try to copy that file for over 30 minutes before moving to the next one. Sometimes it seems it will not ever move to the next file, so this is obviously not the way.

I then tried to copy over 5 file segments and run multiple transfers at once, so that if one encountered a problem file, the other transfers would be able to continue. I thought this was working for a while, but eventually all transfers hung and I was forced to reboot to get a functional system again. What part of this I really don't understand is, why would the time it takes to access files on this broken drive affect my OS functionality at all? A seperate SSD for the OS, RAM isn't maxed out, CPU usage stays crazy low, so why does the system not keep running smoothly? I thought it might be something to do with a page file being on the broken drive, but page file is turned off.

I ran a checkdisk on the broken drive, and after about 24 hours, finished. It was not able to make the drive more functional of course, but I figured it might help the drive understand better what was bad and what was still recoverable.

My next step is to run Clonezilla live disc to attempt to clone the drive over to another so I can be working with a good hard drive to attempt to access these files. I hear CloneZilla will skip bad sectors and keep it moving. I have a 320GB drive available as a destination drive, so I'm going to need to shrink the partition that actually has data from the 1TB drive so it doesn't try to copy almost a TB of free space.

I need help with the exact procedure. I know in disk management I use shrink, but from there I'm not sure how to set it all up to do what I want. Here's a screen shot of my disk management with the 1TB drive plugged in via SATA to USB converter: (I would rather be plugged in SATA obv, but plugging the drive into a sata port renders my system unbootable and I do not have hot swap functionality)



As you can see there is a system reserved, and a recovery partition on the drive that I would like to simply get rid of, but do not want to format the drive (obviously). In the My Computer screen, the Gateway partition shows 872GB free of 916GB. So only 44GB of this drive I'm interested in cloning. I want to shrink the Gateway partition to 44GB (or at least close) so that I can quickly select that partition and clone it to my other drive. I know there was a step by step guide written somewhere, but I can't find it.

TL;DR-Clone a broken drive, any advice? How to shrink partition so free space is gone without losing the data written? Any advice on using CloneZilla, will this skip the bad sectors and still give me access to the good pictures I'm looking for?

Oh okay, so I can't shrink past losing files? I thought I heard that it would move some of them into the new partition, so if I had my 44GB of data and tried to shrink to 20GB, I would have 20GB of files on one partition and 24GB on another. This would be a bad thing to have happen if it actually moved anything, since it would literally take all day.

Anyway, what I need to do then is shrink the partition showing 916GB by 866GB. That would leave 50GB on the original partition, and break the free space away clean, is this correct?

Okay, thanks. I'll just shrink 800GB off of it and should be fine. Hoping for the best, expecting less.

Anyone have any input on system freezing? Like when I know a file is corrupt and try to open it, it will open a picture that is cut in half and overlayed with another picture, all goofed up. That's all good, but then explorer just freezes and I can still use my computer (most of the time) but I can't get the screens off, and using task manager doesn't allow me to shut down the window. What's up with that, if my OS is on a seperate drive, why can't I keep my OS reactive?
Edited by LtStinger - 7/20/12 at 9:16pm

So shrink won't work because it's telling me that it's corrupted. Another way would be to get a live Cloning software that automatically skips free space. Does clonezilla do this? If not, what software to use to clone just the data...

Well the whole point of me doing it is so it doesn't cost money. This is one of the guys I work with at the firehouse, we're definitely not paid enough to spend money on data recovery, and I'm the most technical savvy friend he's got. I just got back from running Clonezilla. After a little setting work, I was able to trick it to bypass the fact that my disk was smaller than the source and the partition was still over 900GB. I figured if it started and stopped once full, I'd have what I was looking for. Sadly, it told me that the drive was corrupted, and scheduled for a check, and to run chkdsk. Everything I try to do to this drive just scapegoats to check disk and won't let me do anything.

LOL like I said I've run checkdisk and it took over an entire day and yielded nadda. I'm wondering if I should abandon the cloning altogether.

Been messing around with a few programs designed to recover jpgs off of corrupted flash media and drives. (heeeeey that's my situation!) So far I've tried "PixRecovery" and "Jpeg Recovery Pro". The problem I had with both of them is they will freeze while asking me which file I want to try to save as it loads the list of files on the drive. Anything that accesses the drive is put to its' knees.

As I've been researching and trying different things, I've also been making attempts at simply dragging the files over to a folder on a known good drive. So far I have quite a few recovered, many with huge corruption issues, but a lot are perfect. It might just be the way to keep going this route, but every time I encounter a file that is (apparently) severely damaged and not just jagged/cut/discolored and such, it will hang, not let me close the window, and progress cannot continue. Very frustrating I can't just cancel and go to the next file, if I could simply solve the hanging problem I would be able to recover the files by drag and drop.

I've got one or two more JPEG recovery programs to try, but I don't expect anything from them. They're not really designed to accomplish what I'm doing here.

Running out of ideas. I've been working on this project for months, and it looks like I have months ahead of me.

Fun example of a corrupted jpg lmao

Would it be dangerous to attempt to defragment this drive? Or could the result turn out lucky?
Edited by LtStinger - 7/20/12 at 11:04pm