Harddisk bad block recovery tool?

[Michael Moser]

My laptop's HD seems to have a major bad block. When trying to read certain files the disk always starts clicking and making strange and rather disturbing noises for about 2 minutes before the system fails and I get a blue screen.Fortunately most of these files seem to be in a directory that I only kept "just in case" anyway, i.e. there would be no major harm, if these file are lost. I only noticed, that these are corrupted, when trying to read them while making a backup. Alas, that backup never fully ran through due to the problem described.

I am thus seeking a program that tries to read the entire disk (and does not crash, if it gets errors...) and marks files that contain unreadable blocks such that the OS doesn't try to access these any more. As far as I know that should be possible. I once read that there is some kind of bad block list somewhere.

Ideally it would also try to read damaged files a certain number of times (e.g. 1000 times or so) trying to recover as much data as possible and if it was able to read entire files it copies their content over to greener pastures. That would allow to minimize the actual data loss.

Is there such a tool? Any suggestions?

Michael

 

[Tom]

I wonder if Gibson's "Scandisk" is still incarnate?

 

[Kerry Brown]

My laptop's HD seems to have a major bad block. When trying to read
certain files the disk always starts clicking and making strange and
rather disturbing noises for about 2 minutes before the system fails and I
get a blue screen.Fortunately most of these files seem to be in a
directory that I only kept "just in case" anyway, i.e. there would be no
major harm, if these file are lost. I only noticed, that these are
corrupted, when trying to read them while making a backup. Alas, that
backup never fully ran through due to the problem described.

I am thus seeking a program that tries to read the entire disk (and does
not crash, if it gets errors...) and marks files that contain unreadable
blocks such that the OS doesn't try to access these any more. As far as I
know that should be possible. I once read that there is some kind of bad
block list somewhere.

Ideally it would also try to read damaged files a certain number of times
(e.g. 1000 times or so) trying to recover as much data as possible and if
it was able to read entire files it copies their content over to greener
pastures. That would allow to minimize the actual data loss.

Is there such a tool? Any suggestions?

Get whatever data you can off of the drive and replace the drive. With
modern drives if you are seeing bad sectors the drive is toast.

 

[Michael Moser]

Get whatever data you can off of the drive and replace the drive. With
modern drives if you are seeing bad sectors the drive is toast.

You are probably right. I have already ordered one. Hope the "old" one makes it till then...

Michael

 

[Michael Moser]

Well Michael, try these steps:
boot to recovery environment and open command prompt,
type: *chkdsk /f/r/b*
if it ask to dismount the drive, press *Y *and press ENTER.
it will take about 45 mins and will try to recover maximum clusters
from the HDD.

Wow - that was easy! Working mainly on XP in the office I hadn't known that Vista's chkdsk had all that capability aleady built-in (the XP version didn't have that /b option).

Since it's the system drive that has these bad blocks I had to run chkdsk as part of a reboot operation and it took quite a while. Somewhere in the middle it spent long times clicking and clacking along (it obviously tried to re-seeks and re-read certain sectors over and over). This took so long that I had to leave home for some other business and so I left it running.

In the end it had booted into the desktop. Now my question: is there any possibility to figure out WHICH files were hit? I.e. which files it could NOT recover? I checked the system logs but apparently chkdsk doesn't enter any finding there. I am just curious, what I might have lost by this operation and whether anything vital was hit or not.

Michael

 

[Michael Moser]

I was investigating my laptops HD a bit closer today (due to some bad block problem I have (or had) - see my other thread and made an interesting observation:

In my C:\Users directory there is an odd directory "C:\Users\<myUserId>.V2" which contains a partial copy of my normal user-directory "C:\Users\<myUserId>" - I just verified that with a directory comparisson tool.

I have no idea how and by whom that folder was created. In theory it could have existed already for a while (i.e. a month or so), since I never had a closer look for a while and the newest files I spotted in that subtree seem to stem from end of February, i.e. are about 4 weeks old. But that directory could also have been just created by the "chkdsk /f/r/b" that I had run this morning.

Does anyone have an idea, what application creates such ".V2" copies of user-directories?

Michael