I have a WD 1600BB - 160 GB hard drive that is failing. I first noticed it one day when the drive started clicking while trying to spin up. It would eventually give up. I finally got the drive to fully spin up and mount be setting the drive upside down.

Now I can reliably get the drive to work as a slave, but only for a little while. The most it will work is for 2 hours. I’m guessing as the drive heats up it stops working, because after it stops, I just shut down for a couple hours, and when I start it up again, it works. Also, it responds very slowly. It takes a very long time to browse the structure and copy files.

I have saved a few hundred pictures, but I still need a bunch more, as well as some source code that was on the drive. The problem is that the folder that contained those files is listed, but the contents are empty. I have tried various programs to recover deleted data, but they never make it out of the analysis phase. They try to scan the entire 80 GB and either it takes longer than the 2 hours my drive lasts, or they get an error and stop.

I am wondering if there is a program that will allow me to specify a directory to restore, and it will try to recover the files from that directory. If anyone has any suggestions, I would really appreciate them.

Thanks
Chris

Hi You need something to image the drive, in stages.

e.g. DeepSpar Disk Imager or dd_rescue

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Cooling the drive in the freezer may help, then wrapping it in an ice pack during recovery.

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I have downloaded knoppix with dd_rescue, but I have found little documentation on how to use it. Does anyone know of a good tutorial?

Also, one set of instructions I found said a need a second hard drive that’s bigger than the partition I am trying to recover. The partition I am trying to recover is 80 GB, but only 60 GB are used. My backup drive has 65 GB free. Will it work, or will I need a drive with at least 80 GB free?

Thanks
Chris

"Cooling the drive in the freezer may help, then wrapping it in an ice pack during recovery." HAHAHAHA...really?