Hi All,

I have a laptop with one physican HDD in it. The D: partition seems to be sitting on a portion of the drive with a bad sector in it. I tried running a "chkdsk /r" and set it to run on reboot. Checkdisk ran but seemed to hang at about 19% and wouldn't progress any further. I let it run for about an hour sitting at 19% before rebooting.

The laptop is still working otherwise - I'm emailing from it now. Can anyone offer any suggestions on either repairing the bad sector or copying the data to another drive?


Cheers,
Kris

Have you imaged the drive??? that is the first step, period (sorry BlackST). After that you can try some file level tools like GetDataBack or Rstudio.

I have the C: partition imaged using Acronis. I also have most of the data on the D: partition backed up as well but I would love to create an image if I could. What tool would you suggest for that? I tried to copy all of the data off again using Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier but Windows crashed when it hit the files with the bad sectors.

Cheers, Kris

You could identify the file that occupies a particular sector, replace it with a good copy, and then delete the original. The next time the OS tries to write to the bad sector, it should be transparently remapped by the drive.

Tip: How to determine which file occupies a particular sector:
http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/mes ... d.id=15364

I'm pretty sure I don't have a good copy of the file(s) sitting on the bad sectors. What should I do in that case? I'm not really concerned about getting all of the files off the drive, but if I could copy whatever could be recovered, that would be great.

Try cloning the partition in reverse using dd_rescue (freeware):
http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/

DD_rescue can also do multipass cloning, and it can be configured to skip over bad patches in the media. It will do the easy sectors on the first pass, and the problematic ones on subsequent passes.