I'm trying to recover some files from a friend's hard drive which was dropped and is giving read errors and bad sectors all over the place.

I only need to recover about 100mb of files, so I want to only scan and fix the sectors in use by those files. However HDD Regenerator only has the option to regenerate one contiguous section of the hard drive (as does Spinrite as far as I can tell from the documentation).

I could just use HDD Regenerator to scan a section big enough to include all the necessary files, but it looks like it would take about a week to finish (my friend needs the files pretty soon), and I'm also worried about the drive lasting a week of constant reading, even if I have a big fan on top of it.

So does anyone know of a program that does the magic that HDD Regenerator/Spinrite do, but only for certain files? Or at least that allow you to specify a batch of sectors/clusters to scan (I could use WinHex or something to get those).

*sigh* They don't do "magic" - they only claim to do so, with obfuscation and pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. I would never use either program for data recovery - search the forum for previous discussions about these programs.

Assuming that your friend accepts the risks of your DIY attempts, and knows that you could kill their disk (and cause lots more internal damage!) with your attempts - then trying to read just those files, as you suggest, first requires you to be able to successfully read the filesystem metadata, to find where the data blocks for those files exist on the disk. For a disk that has been dropped, I doubt that this can be done successfully. What have you successfully read so far? Other people might have a different view, of course, but we're all guessing without the disk in front of the person replying...

[Edited to add: @Luke - all agreed.]

If you would search for HDD Regenerator and SpinRite on this forum, you would have your answer. Basically, it comes down to this. Those two programs are NOT data recovery programs. If you are unable to mirror a drive with bad sectors, I recommend you seek the assistance of a professional data recovery lab before your attempts render the files completely unrecoverable.

By the way, a dropped drive will result in a very severe physical failure. The more you mess with it, the greater the damage will be. So, the odds of a professional lab recovering the data is going down while the price is going up.

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Luke
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Agree with all of the above.

STOP using that crap s/w before it kills the drive completely.

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Well I was kinda dubious about the software's claims as well, so before considering using it as my solution, I tested it out: I used WinHex to find the sectors used by a previously unrecoverable jpg and set HDD Regenerator to work on that range. When it had finished 'regenerating' I tried recovering again and the file copied perfectly and immediately.

Now I'm still worried about the drive breaking before I get the data off (more so after searching on here and these replies), but whatever it did seemed to work, and my thinking was if I could get it to concentrate only on the files I need, I could get the data off before the drive dies..

If you have any other suggestions I'd obviously welcome them - I've tried ddrescue but I had the same problem with not being able to concentrate on specific files.

Oh and this was always a "if you can get the files off it'd be great, but don't worry if you can't" kind of job - if this had been serious, critical data then obviously I would have just told her to get a pro to do it (and she probs wouldn't have let me mess with it anyway ).

Thanks for the replies!

HDD Regenerator can sometimes "work" (with inherent risks on damaged / failing disks), but it's not magic. Anyway, since your friend is accepting the risks of your DIY on her disk...


After you have found the sectors used by a file (which, as I said before, requires that the necessary filesystem metadata blocks are readable - that's what you've been using WinHex to do), then you can use ddrescue to focus on just reading those sectors for specific file(s), by hand-crafting a suitable logfile (but that needs some practice / experience & understanding of how ddrescue works) and requires that ddrescue is performing direct (raw) disk access (to prevent extraneous reads from the disk being requested by the Linux kernel).

There are other techniques which can also be considered, but I'm sensing that you really want to carry on using HDD Regenerator, so I'll let someone who knows that utility reply with suggestions. Good luck!

P.S. Some professional hardware imagers would be able to do automatically, exactly what you're trying to do manually i.e. to target the recovery of the blocks used by specific files - and that service from a DR company shouldn't cost the earth, while the disk is still behaving itself... But it won't be free. Your (friend's) data; your (friend's) choice.

Ouch Spinrite and HDD Regenerator. Not one of the most professionals way of going on this one but it is a nice drive killer. I agere with these guys on this one. You are going to really kill your data in the end if you keep this one up. Sorry but I would not give Spinrite to anyone to use even if I didn't like them. I would feel sorry for them in the end.

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I 'd give it to them if I wanted to have their drive killed.

@OP: I second other's opinion. Vulcan has told you the right answer here: It wouldn't be free if you give this drive to a pro (while there is still time), but it wouldn't cost the earth either.

Good luck.

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Not at all - I was hoping to use this opportunity as a learning experience so any other suggestions are completely welcome.


I've told the hard drive owner about professional recovery (from my quick research it looks like about £100 range?) but she doesn't really want to spend that much money - these are only photos we're talking about, and she's pretty skint.

Obviously, considering the replies, I'm not going to use HDD Regenerator again (I only used it briefly anyway). Though I would like to ask, hatred of the program/advertising tactics aside, would it really be that dangerous to use it just on a small part of the disk as I'm trying to? (assuming there's a way of doing that as per the 1st post)

I'll look into creating a logfile tonight, but before that, is there any easy way to get a list of sectors used by the files I want to recover? My test on one file was done by getting a cluster list in WinHex, converting the start and end clusters of each fragment into relative sectors, then converting those into absolute sectors - but that just seems unnecessarily laborious...

Btw, is there a reason why each JPG is divided into 2 fragments, and each fragment is about 300MB apart, even though it looks like they were all added at the same time? Not important, but I'd like to know..

Thanks!

How much time have you spent on it, already? Are you going to charge her for your time whether or not you are successful? Even so, I'd still try to hook up with a professional lab and try to work out some sort of one-time agreement. If they cannot recover the data, neither will you. If they cannot work within your price constraints, then you are welcome to spend your time ($) as you wish.

When the drive was dropped, the heads likely touched down on the drive's surface, causing some media damage and contamination on the heads. At the stage of the game, the drive appears to still detect, which means that the heads are still reading and the damage isn't fatal. However, every time the heads cross over the path where they touched down, they will cause more damage and more debris and eventually the drive will completely crash. As Serge (from DeepSpar) mentioned in another forum, these tools read and rewrite the bad sectors, which forces the drive to remap the sector, if the drive is unable to write the data back properly. However, if they cannot properly read the sector, they just write back their own garbage to the sector and force the remap, losing the data that was contained within the sector. This is not magic...it is just forcing the drive to do what it does already on its own. It might work if the heads are 100% healthy and there is only a handful of sectors that require long or multiple read retries before they respond. But, if the heads are weak and the surface is damaged, you will kill the drive before you achieve your goal...and have never copied one single sector from the drive. It isn't data recovery until you have actually recovered the data to another drive.

I like what you are trying to do with ddrescue with targeting a few specific files. It would certainly be a nice feature/script. But, if you are able to read the MFT, can you get the drive to mount within Linux? If so, mount the volume, then use ddrescue to image each specific file that you want recovered...be sure to use a log, so that you can go back and keep working it until you get as much as you can read. If you are unable to mount the file system, you really should just to a complete mirror of the drive...again, assuming that it is stable enough to get this done.

Good luck.

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Luke
Recovery Force Donor Inventory: 5,000+ Fully Cataloged HDDs & Growing

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

"Copies file ignoring Bad Blocks. If target file doesn't exist, instead of unread blocks, ZEROs are written. If target file exists, its blocks, corresponding to Bad Blocks in source, are not touched."

You can also fill bad sectors with "** BAD BLOCK ***".

The procedure can be repeated as many times as desired, to fill in the bad blocks, if possible.

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If she is as "skint" ( I will just translate that for some of our North American viewers: he means "strapped for cash") as you say she is, then I would not tell her that £100 going to do the job. If it turns out that she needs to get an actual physical hard drive recovery, then I can tell you that it is going to probably be a lot more than that.

You may have to just tell her to give up on the drive, or go somewhat suicidal with the data and see what you can do with SpinRite.

Agreed with everyone: it's the ultimate drive killing machine.

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