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severe sector damage

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Archive_Me!

Post subject:

Posted: April 23rd, 2004, 12:29

Joined: April 12th, 2004, 22:45
Posts: 13
Location: mexico

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!

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Archive_-=pc3krules=-

Post subject:

Posted: April 24th, 2004, 1:40

Joined: April 2nd, 2004, 0:00
Posts: 16
Location: Brazil

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=-

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Archive_Me!

Post subject:

Posted: April 24th, 2004, 12:31

Joined: April 12th, 2004, 22:45
Posts: 13
Location: mexico

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!

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Archive_-=pc3krules=-

Post subject:

Posted: April 25th, 2004, 21:26

Joined: April 2nd, 2004, 0:00
Posts: 16
Location: Brazil

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=-

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