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Recovering Data from a Hard Drive with Bad Sectors
September 3, 2008 | Hardware | 22 Comments
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Paul,
Thanks for the lesson in hard drives work. There’s one point that should be made to readers which I don’t think came across real clear.
Don’t wait until your hard drive starts to fail before backing up your data. I’ll be the first to admit I’m guilty of this as well, but your article came across as saying to wait until you receive errors before backing up.
Paul,
I had a problematic 15 GB disk 5 years back. I tried to recover the data. but i wasn’t aware of any tool. I used norton disk doctor to find out the bad sectors.
Finally one day i threw the harddisk in the bin.
Do you know any tool that can check whether the harddisk has already got a badsector but using one of the spare sector?
Let me know.
Nihar
@Bcarter: I agree that you shouldn’t wait until you have a hard drive failure before you backup your data. I have written many posts in the past regarding backup, and I will include those links in this post. I just wanted to concentrate on recovering your data in this post.
@Nihar: There are several tools that could help find bad sectors, which I am going to write about in the next post, including the one that I used.
I have a question. I have an old 100 gig hard drive. It got a nasty virus. Today, I tried to slave the drive on another system, but I was not able to view the drive. Also, If I left it plugged in my system locks up. I got the device manager to find the drive, but I couldnt access the files on the drive. Do you think this program you describe would work for this. Thanks
It could work. I once read a drive when Windows wouldn’t even read the partitions. The program was able to find the missing partitions and I was able to then copy over the files.
Paul, thanks for saving my 5 gigs. Glad you could use the experience for your site. Now, any explanation on how my backup hard drive failed at the exact same time as my main drive? Weird huh? Maybe you can recover a few gigs from my back up drive next!
@Martini: No problem. I’ll have to get your backup drive and have a look. Any problems that occurred with your computer may have affected both drives at the same time, causing both drives to eventually report bad sectors. I haven’t looked at your backup drive yet, but I’ll see what is wrong with that one.
I just lost 2-3 large PST files when Windows XP crashed while OUTLOOK was loading. The system did a memory dump and when windows rebooted it did a chkdsk and found un-readable segments on the disk…..it realocated these to “bad sectors” and I cannot even find my PST files.
I want to try to use cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk as a file recovery solution.
Can anyone please comment on this?
Thanks – Greg
Have you tried to repair the drive? Is Windows taking longer to load and access?
I too am wondering about cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk. I am getting the blue screen, cannot boot up. Tried the chkdsk /r and it tells me that there is one or more unrecoverable…. I’m looking at getting another HD and settiing the bad one up as a slave to try to get some of the data up.
Thoughts??
I was reading your steps. Seems I got up to the point where I hit c and nothing happens. I can view the files, but I can’t copy them. I’m using the DOS version of the program tho
I was reading your steps. Seems I got up to the point where I hit c and nothing happens. I can view the files, but I can’t copy them. I’m using the DOS version of the program tho
I was reading your steps. Seems I got up to the point where I hit c and nothing happens. I can view the files, but I can’t copy them. I’m using the DOS version of the program tho