Bad HD and robocopy

Question

After my HD gave me crc errors I wanted to copy one drive to another and picked up a new 1TB hd.

I am using the command robocopy G: J: /MIR /COPYALL /ZB

First it tried copying the file a few times (i didnt count, its not in my window anymore) and got an access denied error, error 5. Then it tried again and locked up. I tried copying that specific file (14mb) and windows says "cant read from source file or disk".

I started robocopy again. Hopefully it will ignore it after a fail attempt or two but what options can i use to say if it doesnt work continue to the next file. It looked like that is what it was doing but for this last one it repeated more then 4times and locked up finally.

I'm open to other copy solutions. I do prefer built in solutions. I am using windows 7

Also how might i do this without the /MIR option. Is /S /E good enough? flag reference here

-edit- i see i can control retries with /R: but i am still open to alternative solutions.

-edit2- It seems to take a few minutes before it decides the try failed. Can i shorten it? The file has been stuck at 20.8% for quiet a while now.

-edit3- I tried a data recovery app. It tried to recover the data and DID NOT mark it as invalid or corrupted. Although i did get a msg saying sectory XYZ had an IO error, continue? but that didnt give me the name of the corrupted file. I dont want this. Best solution for me is getting all good files + names of invalid files.

Answer 1

as you've noticed, /r:3 will do 3 retries instead of 1 million(!)

/w:10 will wait 10 seconds between retries (default is 30)

if you're doing a local copy, I'd do 2 retries with a 1 second wait between them (I keep the 30 second wait when doing network copies in case I knock the cable out)

also do not use /mir as it will delete files in the destination that don't exist in the source (which might matter if you run this command several times) - /E is sufficient

if you're using /copyall, remember to run the command prompt as adminstrator or it probably won't be able to set all the ACLs properly

afterwards, chkdsk /r will try to recover files from bad sectors

Answer 2

You will be better off using data recovery tools like GetDataBack which are aware of the failed drive and will expect failed reads.