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I have had a Patriot Torqz 128gb SSD for a little over a year. It never gave me any trouble until last week, when I returned to the office after about 30 minutes to find Windows hung. After multiple different attempts and strategies, I was never able to recover.

I pulled the drive and put it in a USB external enclosure. I can now access it and recover almost all of my files. The most important file, however, is a 3.2GB backup of all my e-mails over the past couple years, and every time I try to copy this file off the SSD, it hangs at the same location (about 940MB into the copy).

The most important thing to me is this particular file. I would gladly consider the drive a loss if I could get this file back intact. Is this possible? If so, how?

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I have had this too for over a year. I've managed to avoid the spot, but once I hit it, my system freezes (that's on Linux and Windows, BTW). I'd consider the file lost. Better save the rest while it still works – sehe May 23 '11 at 15:34
What format is your mail backup? Plain text? Outlook PST? Or ? – Mark Johnson May 25 '11 at 20:56
@Mark: It is a PST – keithwarren7 Jul 11 '11 at 0:36
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2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

I presume you've tried chkdsk to see if the filesystem is in a consistent state?

You might try booting a Live CD/DVD flavor of Linux such as Knoppix...you'll at least be able to see what errors are being generated at the SATA level. Also, you can try try recovering byte ranges of the file with dd. As ultrasawblade points out, there are variants / wrapper scripts to automate the process (see the linked article). You're probably not getting the whole file back, but you can maybe get most of it back. Hopefully most of it is better than none of it.

The Unstoppable Copier that music2myear mentions sounds like a way to go if you want to stay with a native Windows Solution.

SSD Data Recovery is a Black Art, it's expensive when it's even possible. However, if your data is worth enough to you, you might consider going that route. Definitely check with the manufacturer to see who they recommend, if anybody. I think all the details about how the logical addresses are mapped to physical addresses are proprietary and vary by manufacturer.

You might take the Indilinx SSD Status Tool for a spin and see if it turns anything up. You could try upgrading the firmware if you're not at the latest rev, too, but I'd exhaust all other options first.

Update:

Since you are trying to recover an Outlook PST file, once you've gotten as much of the file back as you're going to get, you're going to want to make a copy of it and turn the Inbox Repair Tool loose on a copy as music2myear suggests.

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Use dd_rescue instead. It doesn't stop when it encounters an error. – ultrasawblade May 25 '11 at 20:22
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up vote 1 down vote

Use Unstoppable Copier http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29 to recover the file and then the Inbox Repair tool (scanpst.exe) to repair the PST.

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