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I have an external HDD that is starting to fail, it has some bad sectors. It's a 1TB fujitsu siemens case with a western digital HDD inside.

Eventually I will backup the whole drive with some backup/imaging software. But atm i dont have the free space to do that. Atm I want to copy some video files, but i'm not able to because the drive hangs while copying a certain file, and disconnects. If i try to resume (using tera copy, great tool btw) it hangs again and disconnects...

I don't seem to easily find a tool to copy that one file (and maybe others later), preferably freeware of course.

Another problem:
i have run chkdsk /r on that drive, and about 4 hours in it was at 1% (phase 1,2 and 3 where don't in a few minutes, phase 4 took hours to get from 0). Atm I don't have access to a pc that can run long enough to get the job done in one sitting.
Is there a better tool out there so I could cut this job in pieces? (or faster, but that seems unlikely)

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3 Answers

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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.

Unstoppable Copier is freeware.

if that doesn't help, try fixing the drive with HDD Regenerator and salvage your files.

HDD Regenerator is shareware ($39.95, money-back guarantee), try before you buy.

p.s.: i have pretty good experiences with this program, but of course sucsess depends on the severity of the damage

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Thx, unstoppable copier did the job as expected. It stopped for a moment where teracopy also had problems, but didnt cause the drive to disconnect/unmount and then just went on copying the rest. – Emile 81 Jan 3 '10 at 20:27
as i said, you can try to revive bad sectors with HDD regenerator, it's doing a very good job. – Molly7244 Jan 3 '10 at 20:29
That particular file was being downloaded by a torrent client, it uses hashing to verify the download and for now i will re-download the damaged parts of that file. But thx for the clarification, I didnt understand it would actually try to recover bad-sector data. – Emile 81 Jan 3 '10 at 20:35
HDD Regenerator does actually not recover data, it will attempt to repair the disk surface so the sector can be read again. – Molly7244 Jan 3 '10 at 20:42
Running HDD Regenerator now, seems to be doing the job. It's super easy, just run from windows. And it is possible to cut the job in pieces, so it does exactly what I want. Lets hope it can fix every bad sector (19 sectors fixed already :) ) – Emile 81 Jan 4 '10 at 22:27
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up vote 2 down vote

If you can handle Linux, ddrescue will do a block by block copy, recovering bad sectors, (like the dd command) to another hard drive. I have used it successfully in the past to recover the contents of a hard drive Windows wouldn't mount.

It is included on the Linux System Rescue CD so you don't need to install Linux on a hard drive.

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up vote 1 down vote

You can try FileSaver. It will copy file in blocks. Even in case that some data cannot be read (after multiple retries) it will continue copy operation (with that data omitted of-course).

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