bad sector of harddisk - disk check and recovery

Question

I got a harddisk from my friend, it maybe broken, so I need to save any remaining data which can be saved.

I can see the drives, but when copy some files, the computer said they are bad and rereadable(not exact phrase).

Then I installed some software, thinking maybe they can check whether and which files are corrupted, then I rebooted the pc.

After the shutdown of the pc, the computer started a disk scan on the harddisk, and I am not awared of any prompt from the pc. Now the scan is running and takes some time to finished.

At the mean time, it found some files and folder are in the bad sector. Then it said the files are replaced by null. And it said it removed a folder because it is entirely unreadable. Actually I don't know what does it mean, **so my question is - What does the scan do when it encounter bad files and folders? Are there any chance I can save the data, maybe with any other software?

By the way, can I stop the scan? I tried to press Esc, Alt+Ctrl+Del, don't work.**

Answer 1

You can try CTRL+BREAK to stop the execution of scandisk command.

After that, I recommend you using Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier to recover your readable files.

Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier recovers files from disks with physical damage. Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method most types of files can be made useable even if some parts of the file were not recoverable in the end.

Answer 2

If the disk is bad, and may die, you need to do as little to it as possible for fear of making it worse,and having it die totally. You do not want to do anything directly to that disk except copy it, and then work from the new disk.

If you can, get a DOS boot disk of Ghost 2003, and start it with the following command

ghost -ia -fro

This will image the entire disk sector-by sector and ignore bad sectors. You can then attach this cloned disk as a secondary disk to a system and suck the data off it. I don't know if Clonezilla, which is free, will ignore bad sectors or do a sector-by-sector copy.