Hi,

My HDD was reformatted in error and ended up with what I thought to be loads of bad sectors, at least that is what every app I could throw at it said so I had the drive sent of for data recovery by two separate companies and they have both come back and said that there are no bad sectors on the drive.

One was able to extract the file/folder structure and the other was able to recover in RAW mode only.

So two questions:

1. What's with 'over-the-counter' apps saying one thing and professional companies saying another. Could it be down to the something I did, like use Drive Genius/Disk Warrior to move data around.

2. Why are the two companies producing different results? One can get the HFS+ file/folder structure the other not

Many thanks for any pointers.

Hi Alex,

1. Maybe your device has sectors that requieres more time to be read. Softwares interpret as bad sector because they reach a timeout. You have to parametrize your tool to give more time to those sectors. That is why DR companies could read sectors that you see as bad.

2. HFS+ reconstruction after been formatted could be tricky. You can use differents softwares tools to do it and some of them will have better results than others. That is my interpretation of what could happend.

Best,

F

I have asked the support people at R-Studio about slowing down the operation. They called it "Rad operation", would that be the correct term?

Which software would allow that kind of process?

Hi, i recommend you to clone your device before R-Studio. You can use ddrescue (under Linux) to do it.

Best!

F

In R-Studio configuration you can manage error reading retries also, if you don´t want to clone.