URGENT Hard Drive Problem! HELP!

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philbagg

philbagg

Just Killing Time
Sorry, I don't normally do the "HELP MEEE!!!" titles but this is kind of urgent. I need to get this sorted ASAP.

My internal hard drive is clicking, it's fucked. I'm trying to save what I can of it by copying it over to a separate drive. The thing is, when I go to copy, there are some files on it that must be on the bad sector, and don't move. They hold up the entire process. Is there any way that I can get what I can off it, and let windows skip the bad parts?

I'm using Windows 7 Enterprise btw.

Edit: The drive wouldn't show up when connected through an Icy Box HDD dock and E-SATA connection, but it shows up when I use a HDD USB adapter. :confused:
 
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Do you have access to a cloning utility? I used Drive Image back in the day and Ghost was popular as well. Don't know what's out there now. Not sure what they might do with bad sectors.


lou
 
Hmm.. tricky... not really my area of expertise Philby...

Can't think of anything unless you have access to a store that sells something like this...

http://www.pcdisktools.com/pcdiskclone.htm

which sort of seems like it might do what you want.

Bit hard to find an open store at 3am though, I'm thinking...

Do you know which files are on the bad sectors, or are there too many to contemplate - oh yeah, internal drive, sorry, probably got a gazillion OS files on it..

Good luck..
 
Actually Armi, there's feck all on my OS partition, just software that I can easily replace. It's the data partition I'm worried about.

I just put my drive in the freezer for about 25 minutes, and I'm running ParetoLogic Data Recovery on it. I have a horrible feeling it'll scan the drive, and then want money before I can recover the files.

Oh, look at that. I googled it while in the middle of this reply and not only does it do what I just said, but some people claim that it makes the files not-recoverable by any other software. I cancelled it, and I'm now using PC Inspector File Recovery. It's getting good reviews, and it's free.

Fingers crossed.
 
Armistice said:
Wow... who'd a thunk it... is this the PC equivalent of boiling guitar strings...
Click to expand...

Not really, freezing your drive is highly recommended in situations like mine.

I'd know, I have TERRIBLE luck with hard drives.
 
Armistice said:
Wow... who'd a thunk it... is this the PC equivalent of boiling guitar strings...
Click to expand...

Yeah I heard about it years ago, it actually worked for me once. Makes you wonder who first tried it and exactley how desperate they where. Probably trying to recover a **** collection.
 
Ok, that software got to the bad sector. I told it to ignore it, and it wouldn't. Click, click, click, click click. WTF is the point on data recovery software if it does fuck all?
 
Freeze the drive will work - you can usually do it repeatedly, too, so you'll probably be ok, man - it's good that you heard it start clicking so you can rescue the data now.

As for what to do it with - I've always used dd, which is freely available on probably any Linux livecd - (booting onto a CD will make your frozen disk last longer so you can get more off in one pass - I mention this because you noted that the OS partition is on the same drive...so this is definitely the route I recommend). If you don't know what dd is - it's a very common old unix tool that just plows through a drive, copying bit for bit onto another one, writing zeroes when it can't read a sector and just moving on.

There is also ddrescue that, I'm led to believe, makes it a little easier to not give the wrong arguments to dd.
 
TyphoidHippo said:
Freeze the drive will work - you can usually do it repeatedly, too, so you'll probably be ok, man - it's good that you heard it start clicking so you can rescue the data now.

As for what to do it with - I've always used dd, which is freely available on probably any Linux livecd - (booting onto a CD will make your frozen disk last longer so you can get more off in one pass - I mention this because you noted that the OS partition is on the same drive...so this is definitely the route I recommend). If you don't know what dd is - it's a very common old unix tool that just plows through a drive, copying bit for bit onto another one, writing zeroes when it can't read a sector and just moving on.

There is also ddrescue that, I'm led to believe, makes it a little easier to not give the wrong arguments to dd.
Click to expand...

I'm using the software that TetraFish mentioned at the moment to make an image of the drive on another drive. Hopefully this works. If it doesn't, I'll look into what you're recommending.

As for the OS thing, we have a kind of chassis type thing in this computer. Me and my dad are the only ones who use it. He has his drive (with his OS and an additional data partition), and I have the same. He has another 2 internal hard drives in the computer already, so they're always shared. He plugs his drive into the chassis, boots up, and it's his operating system. I do the same with mine. I'm on his OS at the moment using the USB adapter on own drive.
 
Then again, by all means, if anybody has any more suggestions, throw em in... Just in case this doesn't work :o
 
Here's a suggestion, once you get this sorted buy one of these and a couple 1TB drives.

http://dlink.ca/products/?pid=509

This is assuming you have a home network. I have one of these for back ups and you can set it up as RAID1 so the two drives mirror each other. If one drive goes bad just snap in another one.
 
Or, try adjusting the springs in the back a little bit....oh shit, that was a different problem. Don't tell Muttley I mentioned the springs. :D
 
Noted ;)

Does ANYONE know how to use this DD/DDRESCUE/DD_RESCUE stuff??

I'm not an idiot when it comes to computers, but jesus christ. Every "how-to" website is full of fucking gibberish.
 
TetraFish said:
Yeah I heard about it years ago, it actually worked for me once. Makes you wonder who first tried it and exactley how desperate they where. Probably trying to recover a **** collection.
Click to expand...

I reckon those data recovery services must see some interesting stuff...
 
I've used Restorer2000 professional (need to buy it) with good luck. It will scan an entire drive (even ones that windows refuses to recognize are present) and let you extract whatever files it can piece together (including deleted ones). You can set the a 'read attempts' number to help speed it up or to give you the best chance at recovery. A full drive scan can take a really long time, but it's saved countless gigs of data for me and other folks I've used it for.

There are certainly other programs that do this type of thing, too. I would, if possible, stop using the drive until you research and decide on a program to try it with.

Freezing has never worked for me, though, I've observed short periods of reading before a drive heats up to a failure point, so I believe that it could help. I'm a bit more frightened of condensation on the drive after removal from the freezer - you wouldn't want to short out anything on the controller.

Good luck.
 
Whale Bone said:
I've used Restorer2000 professional (need to buy it) with good luck. It will scan an entire drive (even ones that windows refuses to recognize are present) and let you extract whatever files it can piece together (including deleted ones). You can set the a 'read attempts' number to help speed it up or to give you the best chance at recovery. A full drive scan can take a really long time, but it's saved countless gigs of data for me and other folks I've used it for.

There are certainly other programs that do this type of thing, too. I would, if possible, stop using the drive until you research and decide on a program to try it with.

Freezing has never worked for me, though, I've observed short periods of reading before a drive heats up to a failure point, so I believe that it could help. I'm a bit more frightened of condensation on the drive after removal from the freezer - you wouldn't want to short out anything on the controller.

Good luck.
Click to expand...

Thanks man! Does it save any kind of log so I can find out what files I lost once it's done?
 
Any lost files are lost because it can't find them generally. However if the directory has the listing and the file's not found, I'm not certain.
 
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