3

Can I always retrieve back the folders and files on a hard disk that contains bad sectors? As far as I know bad sectors do spread, and it can cost your OS unable to bootup if the bad sectors are in the OS drive. But whether it will spread to a situation whereby it's totally unable to retrieve any files and folders or not is something I don't know...

4 Answers 4

4

The first thing to do is to image your drive to a new one, so you're not working on the bad copy. GNU ddrescue is good for this, because it copes with bad sectors.

Once you've run that, depending how badly the image is damaged, you might be able to pull files of from a liveCD (Knoppix, for example); or you might have to use a specialist tool. The data recovery guy I work with swears by GetDataBack (NTFS version, in your case), it's not free, but if it can pull of your data, it's a worthwhile investment, as this may happen again sometime..

If this is business critical data, don't try yourself - take it to a professional.

1
0

From pavsaund's comment on my answer to your other question:

scan disk + check disk can help extend the lifetime of the disk by fixing and recovering files.

If no other changes have been made to the disk (beyond marking the bad sectors) you might be able to get the data back.

There are other data recovery tools but I haven't had to use any so I can't recommend one. A Google search for "data recovery software" shows that there are a lot of products out there.

0

I've tried to recover files that were already partially overwritten or in a bad condition.

My guess would be that if files are (partially) in a bad sector, the recovering software will have a hard time retrieving the files in a perfect state. Meaning they will probably be corrupted.

All I could find so far to do anything about bad sectors would be a low level format, but that would also erase the data... Though perhaps it's more important that you fix the bad sector than retrieve the files on the disk.

0

SpinRite is probably the best tool I've used for doing this sort of thing. Regarding data recovery, the website has this to say:

DynaStat data recovery technology performs deep statistical analysis upon unreadable sectors to recover all or most sector data. Where other utilities give up, SpinRite's DynaStat recovers every last bit of data. See the Data Recovery page for further information.

Check out the SpinRite testimonials page for further praise of this tool.

2
  • I don't like their marketing-speak, especially "no other utility does this claim". How would they know unless they surveyed all other available utilities often and missed none?
    – dbkk101
    Jul 26, 2009 at 17:12
  • Yeah, it may sound like hollow "marketing-speak", but Steve Gibson of Gibson Research, creator of SpinRite, is not the sort of guy to make false claims. He's a really down-to-earth old-school coder (he programs in assembly!) who has been around for years. He's also co-host of the Security Now podcast. If you can't trust Steve, you really can't trust anyone. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he really had surveyed all other utilities in great depth. Jul 26, 2009 at 17:28

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .