Question How to transfer data off a semi-functional drive?

[Lunarcy]

My current 2tb Western Digital HDD has been acting up (similar to the post here ) and upon receiving advice that my drive was dying, I have purchased a new one. The old drive shows up on windows disk partitioner however if I try to initialise it then it states the drive is unspecified. Sometimes when I open Windows it appears with Windows Drive Repair however at a certain point it stops fixing as it is stuck at a percentage. I am unsure how to save the data off the old drive before it stops working and would rather not go to a professional just yet (to save money). If there is any free software that could help me that would be great.

 

[USAFRet]

If it does not properly appear in Windows, your options are severely limited.

Can you show us a screencap of your Disk Management window?

 

[mdd1963]

You are trying to initialize the old drive in Disk Management? (Proceed with caution there, as if successful, you could quite quickly and effectively blank your old drive; fortunately, I don't think WIndows will allow you to jack the C; Drive while WIndows is in use on it, but, I've not tried it...)

You want the new one up for use, right? (Pay no attention to order listed, note capacities carefully to make sure you do the correct action on correct intended drive) The new one should be right clicked, initialized, choose format (GPT) and quick formatted.

Then you can use your choice of cloning software, but, if the drive is giving you issues, I'd be concentrating on getting what you need off of it to an external USB drive while you can, as though a clone would not be successful. That would be safest.

 

[fzabkar]

I would use HDDSuperClone or ddrescue to clone the drive, sector by sector. These tools understand how to work with bad heads or media.

HDDSuperTool has scripts to execute the "WD slow fix". This disables background tasks in the firmware, making the drive much more stable for cloning.

 

[flashdata.io]

I would use HDDSuperClone or ddrescue to clone the drive, sector by sector. These tools understand how to work with bad heads or media.

HDDSuperTool has scripts to execute the "WD slow fix". This disables background tasks in the firmware, making the drive much more stable for cloning.

Thanks for the info.

 

[Lunarcy]

If it does not properly appear in Windows, your options are severely limited.

Can you show us a screencap of your Disk Management window?

Sorry, when trying to start my computer to get the screencap, sometimes it would be stuck on the BIOS menu and not boot up. When I did eventually get on, the drive shows like this on disk partitioner and if I attempt to initialise it then I get the popup window. The red circle shows what device manager sees. I have seen it once as the actual hard drive name instead of unknown device but if I scan for hardware changes then it disappears.

 

[Lunarcy]

I would use HDDSuperClone or ddrescue to clone the drive, sector by sector. These tools understand how to work with bad heads or media.

HDDSuperTool has scripts to execute the "WD slow fix". This disables background tasks in the firmware, making the drive much more stable for cloning.

Would I download one of these onto a bootable USB drive to clone the data? (I just had a quick read and I'm not sure because all of them require linux)