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Recovering files from damaged harddrive

  • 22-04-2011 2:26pm
    #1
    seanp_25
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 230 ✭✭


    Hi,

    I've a lot of bad sectors on a USB drive. I can see all the files in Windows, but when I start to copy one to another clean drive, Windows gives a read error at some stage and gives up.

    Is there some software that will skip these read errors when it finds them, and just keep going and copy over what it can, maybe fill the errors with 0's or something?

    Or a tool that can show me which files are un-readable?

    I've been using HDD Regenerator but that seems to work at a low level and doesn't show info on files, only sectors.

    EDIT: The drive is full of audio and video media files (not exe's), so a glitch here or there should be OK.


Comments

  • #2
    Capt'n Midnight
    Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 93,558 Mod ✭✭✭✭Capt'n Midnight


    first of all anything that writes to the disk reduces your chance of recovering files , for that reason alone I'd avoid all commercial products and all windows only products until you have used the opensoure ones first

    if you are feeling lucky then get photorec and let it can for files



    otherwise if you have bad sectors on a device then you have two options
    a/ try to copy off the really important files - but I guess that's how you discovered you had bad secctors

    b/ use ddrescue with logging to read as much of the device before it deteroiates further - this is kinda advanced so just an outline is given below
    I think there is a port to windows, but cba looking it up since I usually have a linux cd/usb somewhere


    connect your pc to the internet with a cable (wireless can be messy)
    boot up from a linux live CD
    chosse the option to try rather than install
    open a command line (applications - terminal)
    sudo apt-get install gddrescue
    pop in the usb key while that's going on

    to identify drives use
    dmesg
    df -h
    mount
    between you should be able to figure out that the usb key is /dev/sdb etc.

    then it's
    sudo ddrescue /dev/sdb recovery.raw logfile
    the logfile is so when ddrescue retries it will just retry on the bad sectors

    you can copy the recovery.raw file and run potorec against it later


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