can we tackle bad sectors on SMART IDE disks

[bilfast]

Hi Guys

I have a problem. Can anybody help me out PLEASE ........

My hard disk has passed old age and is about to die, but
i've got some stuff on it i must must save. Its 6Gb Hitachi
SMART capable IDE drive. If i had ever run SMART monitoring
i could have made a backup, but now its too late, and my
NTFS volume doesn't boot, it has become inconsistent.

I am sure my files are there on the good parts of the disk
and are retrievable. I've been searching for the right
tool. Most data recovery tools will hang because of
retry attempts reading from bad sectors...

The drive is working fine, but half way through, sector
reads fail, and the software keeps retrying. It is possible
to disable retry but which program has such an option...
Even at the ATAPI/IDE level, you can tell the drive to
report failed reads rather than retrying again n again...

I've never attempted such a challenge, but my plan is to
not test all the worlds demos on my data. I want to
capture a sector by sector image of the disk, store it
in a file. For the sectors that are unreadable, the tool
should write zero's in its place. After that i can mount
a copy of that image and try all sorts of ntfs volume
recovery tools and retrieve the maximum amount of stuff.

Is there a tool that will not retry but rather skip
whenever it stumbles upon a bad sector ?? I don't
know weather linux dd command could help ...
Any experiences ?

Bill

 

[mattjurado]

Have you simply tried mounting the drive into a linux system and copying the files that way?

Matt J.

Please always take the time to backup any and all data before performing any actions suggested for ANY problem, regardless of how minor a change it might seem. Also test the backup to make sure it is intact.

 

[bilfast]

No, i've not tried to mount it on linux, but i think in this case it might not help much.
the drive is a laptop ide drive 6.3 Gb Hitachi/IBM.
it started developing bad sectors six months ago but windows 2000 just carries on, without any notification. So situation became so bad that the critical surface areas storing the ntfs volume information have become unreadable. windows is unable to repair the drive using the scandisk option. when the disk reaches about 30% you can hear the drive retrying reads, while the pc get stuck for a couple of seconds. i've tried spinrite version 6, but it doesn't even start the recovery process, saying the ntfs volume is not accessible. then i erased the partition table, and spinrite v6 said its unable to proceed. i've got the first 30% of the drive data into an image file, i'll be trying restorer 2K to recover any files on it.

in my experience it is the operating temperature that kills hard disk life. my western digital 80G ide drive is already developing problems because it burns even when its not in heavy use. on the other hand ibm 80G ide gets slightly warmer during heavy use, and has given me no problems at all until now, been 2 years running 24/7.

i don't like the spin rite recovery tool because it has to be run on a valid ntfs volume, and its inability to detect bad sector chunks so it doesn't have to sequentially read every bad sector. doing that often kills a dying drive.

Bill

 

[nipester]

Here is an url for a program that will skip bad sectors, it is freeware:

http://pjwalczak.com/scaven/index.php

I have never tried it, but it seems this program will not hang on bad sectors. However it will not create an image either. If you need to scan the rest of the hard drive quickly without hanging for any binary string, this will do it.