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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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[Help] How to read bad sectors?

February 3rd, 2017, 11:25

Hi all,

I got WD drive 500GB caviar blue.
I recoverd 99% of the hard drive after it was suffer from heads failure (transfer few times heads stack to the drive and recover it).
I succeed to read 99% of the drive but there is small zone that I need to recover too because important files are in this area.
The platter seems to be very clean (after I removed all the small dust pieces out of it)
In the small area I suceed to read few sectors and the same sectors every time that I try again but all the other sectors which are close to those readable sectors can't be read.

Is there a way to read also the other sectors?
(Even in the cost of destroying the new heads stack which I put for reading those sectors only)

I shoot in the dark, If I will clean the G-List and/or P-list, should help?
Any other dark magic?
only those sectors (together are about 6-7MB only)

Thank you very much!

Re: [Help] How to read bad sectors?

February 3rd, 2017, 15:47

Agree. Messing with the defect lists will not help.

What I would do is, using Data Extractor, is to make a sector map of the sectors of a particular file and try and read those sectors using various settings of read timeouts and retries.

That's about all you can do. If the sectors are bad (physically damaged) then they are bad, they are gone :-(

Re: [Help] How to read bad sectors?

February 3rd, 2017, 17:16

Could this help?

Bad Block Copy for Windows:
http://alter.org.ua/soft/win/bb_recover/

Re: [Help] How to read bad sectors?

February 4th, 2017, 12:33

Hi all, first I very appriciate your comments each of you (Spildit, pcimage, fzabkar) :)

I am using PC3K with DE for reading the data, already checked the file map of the file by using DE.
98.5% of the file is readable (every time from zero) but those specific few sectors are make me in truble.
Tried several reading methods without luck (didn't try the long timeout yet)
By comparing the file LBA to those in the G-List I didnt find any match, seems like the G-List doesn't know about those bad sectors.

There is small scratch on the platter, about 1mm long, (not sure if it is a scratch or dirt) which I afriad to mess with that, not to make it worse (if I got nothing to loose I will try clean it).
I got 98% clone of the drive but only those important sectors are missing :/
If matther those sectors belong to LDF & MDF (SQL) file which 98% of those files are aleady been saved but still corrupted due to those few sectors.
So my options are:
1) Read the rest sectors and make it 100% file
OR
2) Repair the LDF and/or MDF files (SQL) - which I don't really sure how to

Any other suggestions?
Translator messing, any SA messing, any jenine in the bottle messing, somthing?
This is from the very few cases that I get deep into reading bad sectors.

Re: [Help] How to read bad sectors?

February 4th, 2017, 13:45

Scorpion wrote:The platter seems to be very clean (after I removed all the small dust pieces out of it)

Those particles (dust) you have cleaned is most likely the missing sectors you looking for
Unless you have a way to put them back ;) , then nothing you can do

Re: [Help] How to read bad sectors?

February 4th, 2017, 18:08

Spildit wrote:
Maybe you should start looking intro ways to fix the mysql database ?


I will look into that. Do you have a way to fix mysql database (MDF and/or LDF) files?

I found few tools which suppose to do the trick but I don't experience with them.
Their license not cheap and will know if it was halpfull or not after paying the money..
If there is a way which I can be sure that tool or service will fix the file I will go for it.
I am in kind of a "good" position since most of the file was recovered (so few data was lost).
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