Bad sectors - Best recovery software

[zer0sleep]

Hello,

One of my (internal) hard drive has recently ran into issues and I would very much like to recover the nearly 3TB of data on it (tons of samples for music production).

From what I'm seeing, it looks like there are bad sectors on the drive.

When I copy/paste files, the speed slows down to 300kb/sec and most of the time it simply gets stuck at 0kb/sec indefinitely.

I have managed to copy/paste small individual files at decent speeds, which tells me that these files are probably on the good sectors of the drive.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a good recovery software for something like this?

Thanks a lot,

 

[Lutfij]

You can try Recuva or TestDisk but your results can and will vary.

 

[SgtScream]

If you can log into windows, run the command chkdsk /r
Check disk fixes errors on disk with your hard drive by moving data to sectors that work.
You can also specify a drive if it isn't your system drive:
chkdsk /r d:

 

[velocityg4]

First and foremost. Get everything easy off first. The last thing you want is complete disk failure trying to copy bad files. Ending the chance of recovering files which are still good.

So, copy files in small batches. Setup some way to keep track of copied files. I just make a folder called transferred or toss them in the trash.

When you get to a hanging point. Stop the transfer. With that group cut down the size and try again. I go by halves myself. If a group doesn't work. I take a half group. If that doesn't work. Half that until I isolate the bad file. Then transfer the remainder. Going by binary halves is the most efficient route I know.

You can't just look at what was transferred and what wasn't. When a transfer error occurs. That can be misleading. The bad file could be corrupt but exist on the transfer location. Manually verifying each file is more time consuming than cutting down transfer groups and writing over the previous failed transfer.

It's tedious but you can hopefully isolate the bad files and hope there aren't too many. This will maximize your chances of getting the most good data possible.

This is the method I use when transferring files to a clients new computer if they didn't do backups and there are corrupt files. When I dabbled with Data Recovery I used Nucleus Kernel. Since you don't have failed/missing partitions you can probably use some free program.

 

[cherry blossoms]

NOT recovery software per/se, but grab as much data as you can , THEN worry about the niceities of trying to recover files in the corrupted sectors

Robocopy can be your friend for this. A BRIEF tutorial can be found here:
https://pureinfotech.com/robocopy-recover-and-skip-files-with-errors-from-bad-hard-drive-in-windows/

Many options in Robocopy not explained in the article, but enough to get you started. You'll need to create and read the logs to see what files were skipped.

Unstoppable Copier may be of benefit:
http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29

You can also try to raw copy the drive as an image of course.

 

[fzabkar]

@zer0sleep, you need a tool that understands how to deal with bad sectors. Ordinary tools will keep thrashing a bad sector, thereby accelerating the failure of a weak head. Instead you should use a tool such as ddrescue or HDDSuperClone. These tools will skip over bad sections of the media on the first pass, limiting themselves to the "easy" sectors. On subsequent passes they will attempt to recover the more difficult sectors. These tools will also maintain a log, allowing you to continue after an interruption.

http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsuperclone