Hi! My mom has a somewhat old PC with a Seagate HDD which has 2 TB of storage where only almost 200 GB are being used.

I think this HDD is around 6-8 years old, could be older, but I do not really remember. I have copied certain folders containing pictures for backup purposes.

I have managed to copy all sub-folders under "D:\MOM" (which contains all the pictures to be backed up) expect one with "Pictures". Under that sub-folder I have only managed to copy roughly half of its sub-folders. The folder (MOM) is around 120 GB big.

So, several sub-folders (or some their files) inside of the folder "D:\MOM\Pictures\" are not willing to be copied.

First, it takes minutes to just count the number of files when you check number of files under "Properties" for those sub-folders.

Second, some of these sub-folders will only copy a certain number of the files but will then get stuck at 0 Bytes/sec where I assume it cannot read copy it for whatever reason? In these instances I have still been able to count the number of files inside of the folder but I only got 50-70% of it copied.

Third, when I aborted some of these copying processes that got stuck on 0 Bytes/sec it seemed like it crashed the Explorer.exe and did not restart. So, I restarted with a forced reset and suddenly I could not access the "D:\MOM\Pictures". It claimed to be damaged or not found with an error message.

The only way I could access it again was to go to CMD and run "chkdsk /f D:\" in the command line. After roughly 4 minutes it had fixed it and I could now suddenly access the sub-folders inside of "D:\MOM\Pictures" but I still had issues with copying the same sub-folders as before.

And this time around I had to force another reset on the PC and I got into a pre "chkdsk /f D:\" kind of thing in the loading screen for the OS (Windows 10 Home) instead of getting into the OS with just the error message for the unaccessible folder. This time around it also took roughly and hour to go through the 3 stages of that pre chkdsk thing during loading screen.

So, I want to copy the remaining sub-folders to save the pictures. I am copying to an 64 GB NTFS formatted SanDisk through USB 3.0 SD adapter.

Is there any recommended software to use to diagnose to find out whether it is logical errors or actual mechanical errors in the hard drive? And what recovery tool can I use that can easily let me choose to just copy certain folders that Windows 10 itself have issues copying for wavemeter reason. In my case, it is NOT really about recovery lost or overwritten files. It is about copying files that seem to act or actually be corrupted.

Thanks in advance! / AplAySweden.

P.S. One thing I wonder is "System Privileges" (the PC is logged in as System Administrator though) that might deny copying access? But then I shouldn't even be able to enter these sub-folders if that were the case?

CHKDSK will damage the file system on a drive which has physical problems.

Your best DIY approach would be to clone the drive with HDDSuperClone or ddrescue. These tools understand how to work with bad heads or bad media. Then run data recovery software against the clone, if necessary.

Start with a SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo. Look for reallocated, pending or uncorrectable sectors.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Listen to this advice.

If you are unsure of your skills and data is really important take it to a data recovery pro, it's a cheap job.

_________________
BTC Wallet - 3AoQPTBsz9PbfoanCx44Lw76Y2TwtKa1x5
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/datarecovery_morde.pt/

Looks like the drive is very old and is about to die. Windows scansidk, or chkdisk is damaging the drive so don't do this any more. The drive needs to be cloned which should save most stuff. A data recovery pro can recover this cheap, its just a copy of everything to a new drive. Or do what they said on the above posts.

I also suggest that, is this is the main drive of your computer? You should remove it and use it as a second drive to remove any additional strain on the drive. You goal will be to use the drive as little as possible because all you need now is a bad sector in a very important part of the drive and that will make recovery very expensive. You caught the drive at its early stages of dying.

Thanks for the replies!

Would it be possible to just clone the used space, using HDDSuperClone, from the partition which is roughly the 200 GB? Or does it have to clone the entire 2 TB?

It is important to read the tool's manual.
By itself, by design, it won't be able to select the used space. However, in combination with DMDE, you can target files.
Read the manual for details.

_________________
Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts