[SOLVED] Anyway to repair bad sectors without going into Windows?

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fatalshot808

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Hello, I'm trying to recover photos from an old laptop hard drive and it's giving me issues. So when I try to extract data from it using it as a secondary drive it crashes my OS and it does crash before booting into the OS as well. I've tried to do a error repair inside of Windows too but it just crashes. I tried to even boot into Windows on this corrupted drive but it doesn't get far into Windows. Safe mode was attempted but didn't load past all the text.

I was wondering if there was any way to repair this hard drive without booting into windows basically or even to clone it without going into Windows. Paid software is something I will do too if necessary.
 

punkncat

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Assumption would be that the drive is in process of failing and probably past Windows ability to keep it connected long enough to pull data from it. If you are willing to spend money, contact professional data recovery.

Otherwise, you could attempt an external caddy to see if it will stay connected long enough to pull info from even in short bursts.
 
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fatalshot808

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Assumption would be that the drive is in process of failing and probably past Windows ability to keep it connected long enough to pull data from it. If you are willing to spend money, contact professional data recovery.

Otherwise, you could attempt an external caddy to see if it will stay connected long enough to pull info from even in short bursts.
I don't even know if any important pictures are on it. It's from my girlfriends laptop which is like from 2007-2009. I'll contact them if necessary but this will probably be a loss if I can't do it.
 
It costs a few bucks I think 10-15 for an ISO, but when I did more repair work I used a utility called parted magic. It was an ISO you paid for and downloaded and installed on a USB drive. It has utilities for resetting a windows password, dish partitions, cloning, etc.

Basically you would insert it into a system and boot up the system from it and it would put you into a version of Linux I think. The reason it costs from what I understand is that there’s a guy who develops it and sells his work so he’s coming out with updated versions. I think he even has a subscription if you were someone who did a lot of tech work.

In that utility there was a tool that they later added a gui to called ddrescue. I’ve used that in the past to clone drives that were dying. Basically if you use that or another utility you want to select the option to skip bad sectors. My understanding is that windows will keep attempting to read bad sectors, which is likely why the drive keeps crashing your system. Also your computer trying to read those sections could actually finish off the drive for good. So don’t hook it up unless you are cloning it.

With ddrescue my preference is buy another drive of the same size that you are attempting to recover or larger, and tell ddrescue you want to clone the failing drive directly to the other drive and ship bad sectors and do not attempt to read them again so that it will skip those. With any luck it will work and you will have a drive that has most of the data.

I won’t guarantee you that will work, but in the past I was actually able to clone OS drives that way, insert the drive I cloned to into the pc, and the oc ended up booting, then I was able to use chkdisk to check for errors and then defrag the drive to clean things up. But I’ve seen doing that take days where you literally had to just let it sit 2-3 days doing it’s thing. Depends though on how much data and what shape the drive is in. If you have a ups make sure the system is plugged into that. Though if it’s on a laptop your battery should give that redundancy also. Just make sure the laptop stays plugged in case it takes a while. If something like that doesn’t work you’d probably be looking at professional data recovery like the guys who have a clean room etc.
 

classguy

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I highly recommend Steve Gibson's Spinrite at grc.com. It can work miracles are repairing/recovering failing drives. It's the first thing I would try. Nothing else comes close.
 
I highly recommend Steve Gibson's Spinrite at grc.com. It can work miracles are repairing/recovering failing drives. It's the first thing I would try. Nothing else comes close.

This product is snake oil. Stay away from it as far as you can. If your drive has bad heads or bad media, SpinRite will most likely thrash it to death. None of Gibson's claims are valid for any drive produced since the early 1990s. SpinRite violates the cardinal rule of data recovery, and that is never to write recovered data back to the source drive.

If you want a proper cloning tool for data recovery from a failing drive, use HDDSuperClone. It's free and designed for the job.
 
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