Damaged hard drive

[yaro137]

This is taking forever. It's ~90GB now but at least it's still copying
this time.
Hope it'll finish by tomorrow morning.
yaro

 

[Paul]

This is taking forever. It's ~90GB now but at least it's still copying
this time.
Hope it'll finish by tomorrow morning.
yaro

Control Panels:Administrative Toolserformance

Click the three entries under "Color--Scale--Counter...".
Press the Delete key to get rid of them.

Right-click within the graphing pane, and select "Add Counters".

Using the Performance object menu, select "PhysicalDisk"
Add "Disk Read Bytes/sec" as a counter.

Go back to "Color--Scale--Counter..." and verify a new
entry is there. Right-click the new entry, and select
"Properties". Click "graph". Set Vertical Scale Maximum
to 10000. Click "Apply". Click "OK".

Now, you're looking at a chart of disk read performance.
The full scale value of "10000" is equal to 100MB/sec.
A value of 2000 would be 20MB/sec and so on.

That may help you chart the progress of the transfer
and estimate time of completion. I've used this
before, while using "dd", to see what is going on.

If you use "bs" and "count" parameters, and the
disk interfaces are in DMA mode, the transfer
should go faster. But since you're in the middle of
a transfer, I would not stop now. Finish the current
transfer. The time to experiment with transfer rate,
was right at the very beginning.

Paul

 

[yaro137]

Whole day and whole night but we've got 224GB. Almost there.
Hope it wont brake right at the end.
yaro

 

[yaro137]

Finally finished at ~244 GB but dd came up with the following report:

Error reading file: 27 The drive cannot find the sector requested
488395055+0 records in
488395055+0 records out

Possibly just some bad sector.
yaro

 

[yaro137]

I run testDisk to analyze and that's what I found in the test.log



Fri Jul 31 11:52:22 2009
Command line: TestDisk

TestDisk 6.11.3, Data Recovery Utility, May 2009
Christophe GRENIER <[email protected]>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
OS: Windows XP SP3
Compiler: GCC 4.3, Cygwin 1005.25 - May 6 2009 20:35:43
ext2fs lib: 1.41.4, ntfs lib: 10:0:0, reiserfs lib: 0.3.1-rc8, ewf
lib: 20080501
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(/dev/sda)=79998918144
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(/dev/sdb)=250058268160
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\PhysicalDrive0)
=79998918144
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\PhysicalDrive1)
=250058268160
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\C=79982590464
file_pread(4,1,buffer,156248189(9725/254/63)) lseek err Invalid
argument
file_pread(5,1,buffer,488408129(30401/254/63)) lseek err Invalid
argument
Hard disk list
Disk /dev/sda - 79 GB / 74 GiB - CHS 9725 255 63, sector size=512 -
IC35L080AVVA07-0
Disk /dev/sdb - 250 GB / 232 GiB - CHS 30401 255 63, sector size=512 -
SAMSUNG SP2514N

Partition table type (auto): Intel
Disk /dev/sdb - 250 GB / 232 GiB - SAMSUNG SP2514N
Partition table type: Intel

Analyse Disk /dev/sdb - 250 GB / 232 GiB - CHS 30401 255 63
Geometry from i386 MBR: head=255 sector=63
check_part_i386 1 type 42: no test
check_part_i386 2 type 42: no test
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=255 nbr=4
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=8 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=16 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=32 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=64 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=128 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=240 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=255 nbr=4
Current partition structure:
1 * W2K Dynamic/SFS 0 1 1 3915 254 63 62910477
2 P W2K Dynamic/SFS 3916 0 1 30400 254 63 425481525
Backup partition structure
partition_save
Ask the user for vista mode
Allow partial last cylinder : No
search_vista_part: 0

search_part()
Disk /dev/sdb - 250 GB / 232 GiB - CHS 30401 255 63
NTFS at 0/1/1
filesystem size 62910477
sectors_per_cluster 8
mft_lcn 786432
mftmirr_lcn 3931904
clusters_per_mft_record -10
clusters_per_index_record 1
HPFS - NTFS 0 1 1 3915 254 63 62910477
NTFS, 32 GB / 29 GiB
NTFS at 3916/0/1
filesystem size 425481525
sectors_per_cluster 8
mft_lcn 786432
mftmirr_lcn 26592595
clusters_per_mft_record -10
clusters_per_index_record 1
HPFS - NTFS 3916 0 1 30400 254 63 425481525
[Programy]
NTFS, 217 GB / 202 GiB
file_pread(5,8,buffer,488395084(30401/47/59)) lseek err Invalid
argument
file_pread(5,1,buffer,488395084(30401/47/59)) lseek err Invalid
argument
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=255 nbr=4
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=8 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=16 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=32 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=64 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=128 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=240 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=255 nbr=4

Results
* HPFS - NTFS 0 1 1 3915 254 63 62910477
NTFS, 32 GB / 29 GiB
P HPFS - NTFS 3916 0 1 30400 254 63 425481525
[Programy]
NTFS, 217 GB / 202 GiB

interface_write()
1 * HPFS - NTFS 0 1 1 3915 254 63 62910477
2 P HPFS - NTFS 3916 0 1 30400 254 63 425481525
[Programy]
simulate write!

write_mbr_i386: starting...
write_all_log_i386: starting...
No extended partition

Interface Advanced
Geometry from i386 MBR: head=255 sector=63
check_part_i386 1 type 42: no test
check_part_i386 2 type 42: no test
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=255 nbr=4
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=8 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=16 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=32 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=64 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=128 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=240 nbr=1
get_geometry_from_list_part_aux head=255 nbr=4
1 * W2K Dynamic/SFS 0 1 1 3915 254 63 62910477
2 P W2K Dynamic/SFS 3916 0 1 30400 254 63 425481525

TestDisk exited normally.


It doesn't look bad I think so why won't that work?
yaro

 

[yaro137]

I tried importing that disk one more time and the System log gave me
this:

Source: LDM
VINTERNAL Error - The disk group contains no valid configuration
copies (C10000B6).

and next:

Source: LDM
Unspecified error (80004005).

yaro

 

[yaro137]

Just noticed that TestDisks gives me access to my files on both the
partitions. Cool stuff.
I was able to copy all I need. This is indeed a great tool.
One more time many thanks for your help Paul. If not for you it would
all be gone!
yaro

 

[Paul]

Just noticed that TestDisks gives me access to my files on both the
partitions. Cool stuff.
I was able to copy all I need. This is indeed a great tool.
One more time many thanks for your help Paul. If not for you it would
all be gone!
yaro

The log looked reasonable, in that at least it found
some partitions for you. I'm a bit curious though,
why the "dd" didn't complete. You said the HDTune scan
passed without errors, so I would have expected "dd" to
finish as well.

If you need to do this again some time, investigate the
"dd_rescue" program. This runs under Linux, and might
even be included on a Linux Live CD distro. (Linux Live CDs
allow booting a computer and running Linux, without installing
any software on the hard drives.)

http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/

Since "dd" copies all the sectors, some of those
sectors may not have files stored in them. The partition
may not be full, in which case "dd" is backing up the
slack (empty) space on the disk. So a failure to read
a sector, doesn't necessarily mean a file got damaged.
It could be a slack sector is unreadable, and no one
would care about that (except if perhaps they were
trying to rescue files accidentally deleted in the
trash can).

The reason I insist on backing up a damaged drive, is I had
an incident, where a data recovery utility damaged the
disk I was working on, making the data impossible to recover.
That happened 20 years ago, and I continue to believe to
this day, in backing up the drive first if possible. There
are no guarantees with data recovery programs, as to what
they'll do, and what bugs they may have.

Glad to hear you got all your data back

Paul