severe sector damage

I have a laptop drive that has severe sector damage, what would i use or how can i get around this, so that i may extract the good sectors a lot faster? Any suggetions?

Thank you,
ME!

Hi Me! ???

is strange saying hi to myself

For my experience, when a drive has severe bad sectors, before the head goes down, here is what i do in three easy steps.

I use acr media tools v3.30 to physical clone a hard disk. Set read retries to 0. This program can skip bad sectors and start / resume cloning from any sector. You should know more or less where the bad area start in lba - (mhdd is great for this task) - Lets say in a 40gb hd, for example, full of bads from lba 600000 to 10000000 (300mb to 5Gb)

1 - Clone from sector 0 to the first area infested with bad sectors. Do not let the drive acess areas infested with bad sector by now, as it can damage the head and data recover possibilities.

2 - Skip the bad area (in this example explained above) and clone from 10000001 to the end of the drive

3 - Now that you has most of the good data (it should take about 2 hours on 40gb hard disk) set read retries to 4 (32 is useful only with unstable heads, not with bad sectors) and clone from the bad area (again, in this example explained above).

Observations: save the reports as files, as it could be useful if key areas (like fat, for example) contain bad sectors and you have to manually restore them.

Hope it helps :good:

-=pc3krules=-

hello,

Thanks for the response. I have been using MTL(media tools), unfortunately i don't have a bad area, it seems to be spread throughout the drive. MTL is telling me, oh, about 119,231 hours to complete the clone on a 60Gb hd. I have played with hdd, and this program will only help identify my bad sectors so that i may skipp them? Or would it be better to do the thing that allows you to scan the drive and write the bad sectors out, or something like that. I am sorry i can't be more specfic, i remember reading it here in the forums, i think the attempt at the english guide to using mhdd.

Thanks,
Me!

Hi Me!

What version of media tools are you using (v3.30 or the new professional 2003?)

Another way to rescue data from a severe damaged hard disk is to use media tools "analise layout" function.

Then let it scan the disk starting from lba 0 to the most higher lba possible (without taking too much time - 2 hours on a bad drive should be enough)

Next select the correct found fat and root directory (i asume you are working with a one partition fat32 drive) and in the tree view option select just the important files to be recovered (as user files generally takes less than 10% of total lba sectors)

Regards,

-=pc3krules=-