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I was viewing files from my portable HDD, but then it hanged. Aftewards, there was a "clicking" sound coming from my hard disk. Then a pop-up window came up and I was prompted to reformat the disk. A friend of mine used a software to help to see what's wrong and he detected bad sectors... How do I extract and salvage my files from the bad sectors? Thanks.

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  • You can't recover files from bad sectors. You can however recover files from the remaining non-bad sectors. You'll need to google for data recovery software, there's thousands of options.
    – qasdfdsaq
    Oct 5, 2015 at 12:44
  • Unfortunately clicking is bad news. That indicates that there are mechanical components failing. Keep in mind that the more you use this drive while trying to retrieve the data the more damage you cause to this same data. If you are not absolutely sure what you are doing and the data is of great importance to you , you better look for a reputable data recovery service in your area.
    – Techpumpkin_WD
    Oct 9, 2015 at 9:31

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If there truly are bad sectors, you won't be able to recover them. However you can recover the rest of the disk, including parts of files that were affected by the bad sectors. That clicking sound is bad news. Whatever you do, get everything off fast.

In my humble opinion

  1. Linux will likely handle a failing disk better than Windows and will be free
  2. Try ddrescue for Linux, it's designed for recovering data from a disk that has read errors. It works great.

If you don't have Linux installed, you can use a boot cd like Knoppix or something.

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  • Alright then.. I'll try and give it a go... thanks :)
    – Sampleng
    Oct 6, 2015 at 1:09

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