Why favorite sector recovery tool?

[Irwin]

OK. I ran powermax on my drive that I can't boot from, and it works but
failed miserably and
quickly. Gave some error code which I need to run down, my son couldn't
find the code on the Maxtor website and their phone support is on
holiday.

I have a second hard drive in the box, so I tried to use Ghost 2003 to
transfer the files to the second drive. Ghost crashes with bad sectors
error. I had heard that Drive Image was more fault tolerant, but it
shuts down with CRC read errors.

I wanted to move forward, so I pulled the drive and replaced it with a
new
drive. 160 GB for $40 after rebate. Amazing. Anyhow, the drive with
bad sectors is now sitting in an anti-static bag in a drawer. I will
put
it into another system and try to choose the right tool to interrogate
the drive and
recover the data. So that is my question. Which tool(s) would you use?
I am willing to put in the time, am trying to research it myself, but
would like some direction.

I would prefer that the tool be free, and I would prefer to not have to
learn linux if don't have to. Actually, I would love to learn linux,
know a tiny bit now, but with 2 jobs really don't have the time. There
are numerous 'ultimate recovery disks', many of which are free and are
both unix and windows based. I have a ERD commander disk laying around
here somewhere, though don't know how to use it yet. I have found
recovery freeware called pc inspector. I own systemworks and system
mechanic and other things that are still sitting in their boxes
unopened. Which tool is your favorite and/or has the shortest learning
curve?

Thank you.

 

[Rod Speed]

OK. I ran powermax on my drive that I can't boot from, and
it works but failed miserably and quickly. Gave some error
code which I need to run down, my son couldn't find the code
on the Maxtor website and their phone support is on holiday.

It may be worth persisting with this once they come back.

I have a second hard drive in the box, so I tried to use Ghost 2003 to
transfer the files to the second drive. Ghost crashes with bad sectors error.

You can tell it to ignore bad sectors, carry on regardless.

I had heard that Drive Image was more fault
tolerant, but it shuts down with CRC read errors.

True Image did image a Seagate with a few bad sectors fine.

I wanted to move forward, so I pulled the drive and replaced
it with a new drive. 160 GB for $40 after rebate. Amazing.

Yeah, margins are so thin that its clear why
Maxtor went bust when their failure rate spiked.

Anyhow, the drive with bad sectors is now sitting in an anti-static
bag in a drawer. I will put it into another system and try to choose
the right tool to interrogate the drive and recover the data. So that
is my question. Which tool(s) would you use?

I like Easy Recovery Pro, but it aint free.

I am willing to put in the time, am trying to
research it myself, but would like some direction.

I would prefer that the tool be free, and I would prefer to not have
to learn linux if don't have to. Actually, I would love to learn linux,
know a tiny bit now, but with 2 jobs really don't have the time.

Yeah, its something that does take some time at that level.

There are numerous 'ultimate recovery disks', many of which
are free and are both unix and windows based. I have a ERD
commander disk laying around here somewhere, though don't
know how to use it yet. I have found recovery freeware called
pc inspector. I own systemworks and system mechanic and
other things that are still sitting in their boxes unopened. Which
tool is your favorite and/or has the shortest learning curve?

ERP but it aint free.

And I'd image the drive using True Image first too for safety.

There's also a few forensic cloners around that will do a sector
by sector copy and try to get what they can out of bad sectors
too, but I dont know of any decent free ones of those either.