Question Copying from dying hard drive.

Aug 9, 2019
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Hi there.
I have a 5 year old Toshiba hard drive (3TB), and according to HD Sentinel it has 2005 bad sectors and is a goner.

So, I copied everything off successfully...but how do I know whether or not any of that data was corrupted? If so, is there a way to determine which specific files were corrupted?

The disk isn't dead yet, so I could still do scans on it or whatever if needed.

Thanks.
 
Unless you already had created a comparison hash like an MD5 hash for file verification, the only certain way is to really look through the files and see what is corrupted (if anything).

Xcopy/robocopy can do log files if needed, then you'd have to look through the log files for errors for POSSIBLE problems.

Teracopy is a 3rd party program that might also be useful. Not sure if the feature you need are in the free version though.
 
Aug 9, 2019
5
0
510
Unless you already had created a comparison hash like an MD5 hash for file verification, the only certain way is to really look through the files and see what is corrupted (if anything).

Xcopy/robocopy can do log files if needed, then you'd have to look through the log files for errors for POSSIBLE problems.

Teracopy is a 3rd party program that might also be useful. Not sure if the feature you need are in the free version though.


I used winrobocopy, a GUI version of robocopy, and according to the log everything copied without problems, except for one directory mismatch. Does this mean the files are not corrupted?
 
Not necessarily. The files could still be corrupted. The log will contain info on what couldn't copy. The logs are mainly there to show you possible problems that are more likely. If files were corrupted, but the sector links were ok, the drive could read through the blocks, or was able to use error correction to retrieve something, it would happily churn though and copy. Bit errors can still creep in. If you had crosslinked files, a simple copy wouldn't detect those.

A previously created independent comparison hash (or manually reviewing the files) is the only sure way.