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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Problem with Acer 5920G - Hard Disk is going to fail

June 7th, 2010, 18:58

Hello everyone,

I have a serious problem with my hard disk on this laptop.
My hard disk is divided in 2 partition, Boot (C) and Data (D).
Some days ago, the disk started to make a strange noise (not loud, just a low repeated sound) when I try to get a file from D, and the computer froze. After some attempts to get the file (without success), the C partition was affected by the same problem as well, and I didn't was able to boot further.
I googled and I found some nice tools that could create an 1:1 image of the damaged disk: i've tried dd, ddrescue, dd_rhelp, safecopy, but nothing of these gave an appreciable result...
A little while ago, I launched ddrescue with this command: "ddrescue --no-split /dev/sda3 imagefile.img" as descripted in this page: http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue .
I noticed a very interesting (terrifying?) thing: after about 1,5Gb of recovery in which errors hadn't been found, ddrescue caught only errors, and for every error ddrescue found Palimpsest told me that one more sector of the disk was damaged.
In practice, each time ddrescue attempted to read a sector (after 1,5 Gb), it seemed that ddrescue made this sector definitely damaged.
Once discovered this information I closed ddrescue immediately, but now I don't know what to do...

Do you know what I can do for obtain an image of my partition (or recovery it in another way) without damaging this even more?

I hope you can help me.

Regards

Re: Problem with Acer 5920G - Hard Disk is going to fail

June 8th, 2010, 10:22

Your hard disk is experiencing some form of mechanical failure which is causing sector damage to grow. Attempting to image your disk, though theoretically the right thing to try, is causing stress to the disk and will only cause further damage. You will need professional help at this point if your data is important. Further attempts at imaging will cause data loss, especially if heads are weak or failing. Decide if data is important and proceed accordingly.
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