[mark103]

Hi all,

I need your advice, I am thinking about make an image of my old HDD hard drive to put them on another hard drive, so I could recover my files on another drive. I don't have any problem with accessing the drive, but I am having a problem with accessing my files through on the data recovery program because it have bad sectors and I have lost my files due to computer went crash.

When I attempted to scan my files through on the data recovery program, it will take hours to scan my files and I dont want to make it worse that would put the stress on the drive and it get died before I attempt to recover my files.

Do you think it is a good idea if I should make an image of the disk with bad sectors to put them on another disk so I could attempt to recover my files on another drive or do you think if I should send the faulty disk to a professional data recovery company who will do this more easily?

I hope it will give you an idea with what I am trying to do to save my money without send the drive to a professional data recovery company.

Any advice would be much appreicated.

Thanks in advance

 

[larvabom]

I've had similar dilemma 2 years ago when one of my very old drives was accessible, but when I was trying to reach certain files it would skip due to bad sectors and would bypass big chunk of disk which was useless to me.

Try Hard Disk Sentinel sector repair tool (surface test) I love that program. It actually doesn't fix bad sectors per-say nothing will, but depending on severity of bad sectors on your drive what it does, in very cleaver way it tries to move the bad sectors so windows itself or recovery programs would be able to read the disk as OK and if the file(s) are even partially good, you be able to recover them.

In fact afterwords you could image the whole disk 1:1 with something like Terabyte for windows, it does magic and you could move that image via USB to different PC then mount it with built in Terabyte image mounter and go from there.

 

[Agent_kenshin]

Is the data important? Are there any loud noises, the click of death, etc? If yes STOP take it to a pro. What does the SMART information look like?

Try Hard Disk Sentinel sector repair tool (surface test) I love that program. It actually doesn't fix bad sectors per-say nothing will, but depending on severity of bad sectors on your drive what it does, in very cleaver way it tries to move the bad sectors so windows itself or recovery programs would be able to read the disk as OK and if the file(s) are even partially good, you be able to recover them.

Getting the data as much of it as you can off the drive should be the first order of business. Do not do any tests or any data recovery programs until this happens. You can do a 1:1 copy with Clonezilla and you can set some options to brute force through any errors if you are having any issues during the cloning process. Depending on how bad the drive is this can take some time.

Another option is to manually copy items one by one off the failing drive to the new one and if you cannot copy something over which can result in a system hang, make note of it and move on. I have actually done this on a old failing 3TB WD Green which had pending reallocated sectors and I could not read a few files. I had backups for them so it was no big deal.

After that clone is taken or data moved off the drive, you can then start to play around with the failing drive. If it something related to pending/reallocated sectors, you can run the long duration surface tests tools provided WD Data Lifeguard/Seagate Seatools (use the non windows versions) which will try to correct any problems. You may have to run this multiple times in a row until it reports no problems found. I did just this for that failing 3TB WD Green and after around 3 full runs of WD's data Lifeguard Tools, those files could be read and copied again. I would suggest you do any of these tests on a spare system since this will take some time.

 

[Lord Xeb]

I have used clone zilla but a drive can be too far gone to use software methods and require the pros. Please be careful you CAN kill your drive.