Bad sectors on Toshiba 30 GB, 2.5"

Having a big problem with the HD in my laptop at work. For me its a big problem, for the HD gurus here I bet it would be deaily solved! The drive in question is a 2.5", 30 GB Toshiba with NTFS file system.

It would appear that the drive has some bad sectors on it, so I'm planning to replace it. I'm just now trying to get as much data out as I can, unfortunately the process is getting stuck on the "My Documents" folder, which is what I REALLY need!

The drive basically hangs, I'm assuming, when it tries to access one or more bad sectors. The drive will just start making a repetitive sound (not so bad as the click of death though) and nothing short of a hard reset will get it going again. I have tried running "salvation HDD scan and repair" which successfully identifies 5 bad sectors. When it tries to repair them, the drive hangs. I have also tried MHDD32 which hangs during the scanning process as soon as it hits the first bad sector.

What I'm looking for is a suggestion for drive scan/repair software that might get past these bad sectors and mark them as bad without hanging. I've also been wondering if there is a way to manually mark bad sectors so they will just be skipped over and hopefully avoid hanging up the drive. I've resigned myself to the fact that I will lose some data, so if I could just somehow mark the bad sectors without attempting to restore the data, I think I would be satisfied.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

I think chkdsk /R /F will do the job!

DO NOT RUN CHKDSK! unless you do not need the data anymore.

Hm. I don't think that chkdsk is the best solution here, but if the drive has only 5 defects, why not? chkdsk will make windows skip these defects, and this will solve the problem.

Hi,

since DreamDealer is saying the drive hangs, I don't think chkdsk will cope with it.
I would definitely create an image of the drive and try to recover the data from that.

pepe

Dreamdealer,
Have you tried Spinrite, I've found it works well on drives with a FEW bad sectors.

Good luck

Dogbyte

I agree with Pepe, although I believe the drive will hang while cloning just as it did with MHDD.

MHDD never failed me, even when **all others** failed (excluding more advanced tools like PC3000 or HRT, which unfortunately I never used, so I can't tell about it). I guess we are dealing with something really hard on disk surface. Maybe Dmitry could put some light on this.

I don't recommend Spinrite. It works well, but it is too damn slow because the author is more interested in self-promotion through pseudoscience than in recovering data. The time it takes is not a viable solution for today's large drives.

On the contrary, I used HDD Regenerator several times and I consider it very good.

Anyway, for the reasons above, I don't think it will make any difference here. Dreamdealer needs advice from more experienced members and I'm certainly not one of them.

Daniel

Unfortunately it seems that any sort of recovery software would cause the drive to hang (I did also try Spinrite). My last resort was to try Pepe's solution and recover from an image. I had been able to boot from a Knoppix CD, which I was going to use with several carefully crafted runs of the dd command to make an image and skip over the sectors that Salvation had listed. Unfortunately the drive decided to unleash the click of death before I was able to try this. I think now it would take more unconventional means to get any data out of it.

Thanks to everyone for all of the suggestions! By this experience I certainly learned more about hdd recovery methods than I had ever hoped I would need to know!

Please stand for a minute in memoriam of DreamDealer's disk!

pepe