Dead Drive: How to bypass bad sectors?

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dedbeats

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Dec 13, 2011
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I have a fairly new WD external HDD that bit the dust while I was writing a few video files to it the other day. The writing was on the wall as the drive would randomly disconnect from the computer for no reason and needed to be power cycled to return.

Chkdsk wouldn't work on the drive. I'm using EaseUS Partition Master to test the drive now, it's only 25% done yet it has already detected 44270 bad sectors. Is there any way to isolate and avoid these bad sectors just to access the drive once more and salvage whatever is on it? I'd like to do this before I RMA.

The drive was used mainly as a backup, but there are some unique files I need to pull off. I used Photorec to recover some of the files, but the problem is nothing is named and it will take weeks to sort through to figure out what is a backup and what is an original. It took about 5 hours to complete that, and that wasn't even the entire drive. It's a 3TB so if I recovered the entire drive, the estimated time of completion was 150 hours and increasing.

TL;DR I don't care about the corrupt files on the bad sectors, what's gone is gone. I just want to be able to access the drive and selectively copy off the small percentage of files I need. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
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The drive will automatically assign new sectors and the count is reported in SMART data. The sectors failing shoudl be clusters, and file systems try to cluster file data to improve read times. There is a chance you can get data.

Download WD's tool from their support page. Have it do a surface scan (or whatever they call it in the tool). Then look at the smart data to see how many sectors you lost.

These are typically 512 byte sectors (although maybe advanced format drive with 4K sectors). 512 bytes times 44K failed sectors (so far) = 22MB of bad data. 22MB of failed is huge, but not as a percent of the drive.
 
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Don't get to high hopes, usually the data is unrecoverable...... (Except professional data recovery company)

Every time u do copy/write the data or doing disk check/test it will hasten/add the damage to the disk........ (If the hdd is already broken)
 
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Try the tool PBD(Partition Bad Disk) which can bypass bad sectors and create healthy partitions.


 
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Clone your drive sector-by-sector using a tool that knows how to work around bad sectors, and then use data recovery software on the clone.

A good freeware cloning tool is ddrescue:

http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

Ddrescue can perform multipass cloning. It clones the easy sectors on the first pass, and attempts the more difficult ones on subsequent passes. It can also clone your drive in reverse, thereby disabling lookahead caching. It keeps a log, allowing it to resume after an interruption.

The following thread discusses various freeware and commercial cloning tools:
http://forum.hddguru.com/the-best-disk-cloning-hardware-software-t10396.html
 
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Seems that everyone is more interested in data recovery than prevention of further data writing on this bad sectors… Anybody knows any program that MARKS bad sectors and prevents system from putting file on this location?
 
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Seems that everyone is more interested in data recovery than prevention of further data writing on this bad sectors… Anybody knows any program that MARKS bad sectors and prevents system from putting file on this location?
Click to expand...



I'm gonna point out two very SMART programs for you and others interested that such things along with a grip of other wonderfully useful/helpful things..

1st one --- HD Tune Pro 5.00 (less then 10mb in total size & easy to use from a USB flash or other source)
HDTune.com retails $35us or $00.00 from PB or a friend emailing it

2nd one --- StableBit Scanner the gold standard in this sort field.. And other then mailing a HHD off to company to fix/recover for like $200 this program has the best chance of recovering files,and the bad sectors they are in.. And everything else you could think of (It just doesn't give reach arounds or windows sills)
StableBit.com/Scanner Has a 30day free trial, and costs a totally worth it price of $24.95
 
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**********SOLUTION......I JUST HAD THE SAME PROBLEM AND WAS ABLE TO SOLVE IT TODAY*************

To the original poster (dedbeats) and anyone else looking to solve this problem: I just successfully used CloneZilla to solve this very same problem, today. My drive failed a few weeks ago and it took me this long to figure out how to copy the data off of the failing drive, which has tens of thousands of bad sectors too. I used CloneZilla. It is a FREE open-source program. It is available here, as a standalone program. I followed the instructions to put it onto a USB thumb drive and boot off of it: http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php.

You can also get it here, included in Parted Magic, for a small fee of $5. Parted Magic has many other utilities too, so this is very useful: https://partedmagic.com/downloads.

Important: while using CloneZilla, in order for it to recover AROUND bad sectors, but not fail due to bad sectors, make sure to run it in "Expert" mode when the option comes up, and select the "-rescue" option. See here for screenshots of what I am talking about: http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/doc/03_Disk_to_disk_clone/advanced/05-advanced-param.php.

Final notes: this worked perfectly for me. I did an entire hard drive clone, from my bad drive to a good drive of equal or greater size (equal in my case). Also, normally, doing this operation requires about 4 hrs. for the amount of data I have, however, the "-rescue" option took more like 12 hrs. since it had to work around bad sectors. Now, I have an external hard drive with a duplicate of my system when the drive failed, so that I can access my old files from my new operating system and recover data as needed, so long as it didn't fall on a bad sector and get corrupted.

Also, I highly recommend using FreeFileSync (also open-source) as a data backup program. http://freefilesync.sourceforge.net/. I discovered it within the last 2 weeks. I reinstalled my new operating system a couple weeks ago, and copied my backed-up data back onto it. Then, I searched for a better way to do backups, withOUT having to use backup software which is unreadable (via Windows Explorer) on the backup end. I discovered FreeFileSync after many hours of searching. I am using it to backup ~65GB of data on my new hard drive, and it does a perfect file-for-file duplicate from source to destination. Now that I've done the first copy, it only takes ~3 min. to update the destination copy each time I click the shortcut to run a script (batch file) on my desktop. Super handy; super nice. Now, I can avoid major data loss in the future.
 
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I was mistaken, my drive does NOT have tens of thousands of bad sectors, but rather, it has tens of thousands of "Raw Read Error Rates," and only 82 bad sectors, according to the SMART data. However, while I was watching CloneZilla operate, it threw an error for each bad sector it could not read (though it continued past them eventually since I used the "-rescue" option), and it appeared to me that it had more like hundreds of bad sectors, not 82. I can't confirm that number, however.

What I can say is that the drive is damaged enough that when I used Parted Magic to try and write zeros to the drive, in order to securely erase it, it failed, and actually froze the Parted Magic operating system. Also, I used SeaGate's "SeaTools for Windows" hard drive repair/analyzer program, and it also failed to securely erase the drive, yet it did work on a healthy hard drive of the exact same make and model. Note: SeaGate is who is doing the warranty for my hard drive. Even though it is a Samsung drive, SeaGate handles the warranties for it.

Kyle, I installed HDDExpert, but it seems to only be able to read the SMART data in the internal hdd of my laptop. My bad hdd is now in an external hard drive enclosure, so I used GSmartControl version 0.8.7 instead, which is a GUI version of Smartmontools. It can be downloaded free here: http://gsmartcontrol.berlios.de/home/index.php/en/Downloads. I am confident that it read the exact same thing as HDDExpert would have read, however, because I compared its results on my new internal hard drive to the results from HDDExpert, and they were identical.

As for my bad hard drive (now in an external enclosure), which I successfully cloned via CloneZilla, here are the SMART data results from GSmartControl:

-I have no idea how to insert an image here, so I am uploading it to Google Drive then posting a link.
Image 1: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwHItOaHOOvdenlKWDJ4aDYtSUE/edit?usp=sharing
Image 2: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwHItOaHOOvdY2lZTzdWUmhfSVE/edit?usp=sharing

 
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Try Bad Block Copy for Windows:
http://alter.org.ua/soft/win/bb_recover/

It's like ddrescue, but it allows you to target specific files.

As for Seagate's Raw Read Error Rate SMART attribute, the raw value is a sector count, not an error count.

See the following article:

Seagate's Seek Error Rate, Raw Read Error Rate, and Hardware ECC Recovered SMART attributes:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/Seagate_SER_RRER_HEC.html
 
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Interesting, then I guess I was right the first time! It does have tens of thousands of bad sectors. Anyway, the drive was mailed back to SeaGate today. Glad to have this behind me. Computers are a hassle.
 
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Ok you lost me. The raw value (Raw Read Error Rate) is 35876. If the drive reads 250 million sectors, 35876 cannot be the number of sectors that have been read, since 250,000,000 does not equal 35876. I must not be understanding you correctly.
 
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The RRER attribute is a rolling average. The drive counts the number of errors in the last block of 250 million sectors and then computes a logarithmic normalised value over this block. A normalised value of 120 reflects 0 errors, ie a perfect score.

The raw value of the attribute starts off at 0 and increases to 250 million. When it reaches 250 million, this number rolls over to 0. The drive then begins monitoring the error rate over the next block of 250 million sectors.

In your case the drive has read 35876 sectors in the current block. That's all that this number means. It says nothing about how many errors were recorded in this block.
 
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I see. So the indicator that my drive is bad is the fact that the RRER "norm-ed value" is 1, NOT the fact that the "Raw Value" is 35876?

Also, I'd like to add that on my "certified repaired" hard drive, of the exact same make and model, the RRER "norm-ed value" is 100, and the "Raw value" is 202. What do you make of that? Does your understanding of the SMART values allow for differences in the "Raw value" among different drives of the same make and model?

Lastly, it just occured to me that I need to add that although SeaGate is the warranty provider for these 2 hard drives, Samsung is the maker. Not only that, but I suspect that my drives do NOT follow SeaGate's SMART algorithms, as when I checked the information on them, per SeaGate's instructions, using SeaTools for Windows, the Seagate utility says that SMART is not even supported on my Samsung drives, yet you can see from my images posted above that clearly SMART is supported on these drives. That indicates to me that SeaTools can't even read, detect, or use the SMART data on my Samsung drives, despite the fact they are covered under warranty by Seagate. If that is the case, these drives must not be using Seagate's SMART algorithms at all.
 
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You actually have a Samsung drive that has been rebranded as a Seagate. Therefore my interpretation of the SMART data does not apply. Samsung calculates the SMART attributes in a completely different way. That said, a normalised RRER value of 1 denotes a failure in that attribute for both Samsung and Seagate drives. The raw value of the RRER for a Samsung drive probably reflects actual read errors, but I'm not certain. You should probably compare your SMART data against others via a Google search.

As for SeaTools, it is often the case that SeaTools for Windows (and other HDD tools) have difficulty communicating with certain SATA controller drivers. In this case you will most probably find that SeaTools for DOS will see the drive and correctly detect the SMART data.


 
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If you jump back to my comment on 19 Oct. you'll see where I came in. I was simply posting a helpful tip to those who have a drive with bad sectors but want to recover data. I successfully recovered my data off of a failing drive with bad sectors (refer back to that post) that would no longer boot properly or run Windows without freezing. I used CloneZilla with the "-rescue" Advanced parameter set.
 
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