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I have some old HDD with rapidly degrading magnetic surface (surface where files are stored). The platter is losing its magnetic properties (and, thus, files stored on it) and I need a way to read some files and back up.

HDD healing software is working, but the problem is that healing is taking too long and only god knows if the software is healing some present or deleted file still on the disk.

Luckily, the HDD healing software I'm using can be placed to work starting from any sector, but I have no idea what the starting sector of the file I need is.

Is there any Windows software that I could use to enumerate all files on the damaged disk and show their starting sectors?

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2 types , one would read the TOC table of contents of the file system, and know that, because that is what these tables hold. The second kind tries to read the whole disk RAW, sector by sector, because it could not get the info from the tables. The 2 types of recovery can exist in one program, or there can be seperate programs that work using specific methods. If your into sector by sector , it is going to take a long time, and results might be broken up. If your trying to "heal"/repair the disk itself , and the disk is that screwed up, then shouldnt a read only method be used? – Psycogeek Feb 9 '12 at 1:08

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If the files in question are fragmented, you may need to know multiple starting clusters. Low-level disk repair software is usually not aware of the file system, quite intentionally, so it won't know how to find the next group of clusters for the file once it gets to the end of the first group.

That being said...

Try SysInternals DiskView (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896650).

The program works in kind of a weird way...

  1. Select a volume at the bottom of the window, and click Refresh. You might also want to click the up arrow five or six times to zoom in.
  2. After the volume scan is complete, use the Highlight box at the top to select the file you want to find. You can use the ... button to browse for a file.
  3. The program will highlight in yellow the clusters occupied by the file.
  4. Click the first cluster to get info about it.
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This is great! Just one more thing: how to convert "cluster on disk" information to "sector on disk" information? :) – BoPe Feb 9 '12 at 17:39
I'll try to dig up a utility or something better, but you could do "fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo C:" That would give you bytes per sector and bytes per cluster, so you could do the math manually (yikes!). – Patrick S. Feb 10 '12 at 3:13
Ok, no need for that. My drive has more than 2GB so it's 8 sectors per cluster. Thank you! – BoPe Feb 10 '12 at 12:16

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