Maybe it is caused by bad sector

[John]

A few days ago, a message saying "windows detected a hard disk problem"
appears when I log into Vista.
Initially, nothing happen. Suddenly one day, my Vista started lagging(very
serious).
I therefore make it to be a USB external HD, and then try to copy the files.
However, the HD stops working when reaching certain sector while copying. I
attempt to repair it by using chkdsk tool and Seagate repair tool, the
process stopped at a percentage.

Any solution for me to copy my files please?

Thanks for any idea.

 

[Kerry Brown]

Copy the files from a command line with xcopy using the /C command to tell
xcopy to ignore any errors. This will copy all the files without bad
sectors. The files with bad sectors are lost. Here's an example:

xcopy u:\*.* d:\oldfiles\ /e/c

This will copy all files from drive U: to a folder on drive D: called
oldfiles. Note that oldfiles must already exist.

 

[ray]

A few days ago, a message saying "windows detected a hard disk problem"
appears when I log into Vista.
Initially, nothing happen. Suddenly one day, my Vista started
lagging(very serious).
I therefore make it to be a USB external HD, and then try to copy the
files. However, the HD stops working when reaching certain sector while
copying. I attempt to repair it by using chkdsk tool and Seagate repair
tool, the process stopped at a percentage.

Any solution for me to copy my files please?

Thanks for any idea.

The most reliable way I've found:

Have another drive with room for an image of the bad partition.
Boot a Linux Live CD.
In a terminal window: 'dd if=locationofbaddisk of=locationtoputimage
conv=noerror conv=sync'
The noerror tells the copy to keep going past bad blocks while the sync
tells it to replace bad blocks with zeroes.

At this point you will have an image of the partition in a file on your
disk. You can now loop mount, fsck and read all the files on the image.
I've done this several times on bad disks and successfully retrieved the
data on the drive.

 

[John]

It works!!!! you help me a lot!!!! Thanks a lot!!!

How about those folders, e.g. My documents? It said "Access is denied." I
think it is the matter of privilege. How can I overcome it?

 

[John]

Just want to recover my data right now!

 

[JEWboy]

Your OS needs to mark that as unusuable sector, obviously. I t can STILl
work fine, but now hear this:

If you're working with critical files, e.g. for government or in my case
reaearch - if one sector went bad, more may follow.
It's an emergency for people like me, but maybe not for your home/basic
users.

I'd immediately save all documents and replace driver EVEN if a single
sector went bad, I'd use it as a scrap, backup for noncritical data, etc -
but never hold OS or important stuff on it again, ever.
Bad sectors might be due to software, but usually it's a real bad physical
failure meaning magentic film covering your plate - one or more magnetic
domains are unable to change & hold its B-field phase.

In plain English something started to 'go off" on your platter. Many years
ago however I kept using a harddisk with a BUNCH (not just one) bad sectors,
because ot was a home laptop and in those years a portable (laptop) harddisk
cost so much, you'd have a heart attack. $400 or so, now apply infaltion
factor and it's like $600 today, since then I only use IBM-marketed,
Hitachi-made drives. I love Hitachi for thei rpatents & reliability, if you
buy many USB external drives today, chances are inside is a Hitachi,
regardless of what labelign says on outside.

My "black list" includes Western Digital - high failure rate, don't like
them. I usually prefer Japanese or American military-grade for all small
electronics, e.g. IBM/Hitachi (IBM used to own that division), Seagate, etc.
For external driver I used to prefer Iomega's but not sure what HDD supplier
they used and it faded away, Iomega is now mixed with dozens of others, used
to be elite.

SimpleTech external USB drives use Hitachi.

 

[JEWboy]

There're companies whose entire busienss is data recovery from physically
damaged media (harddisks or optical).

Their service costs plenty and only makes sense for corporate or government
customers.
But if you can afford, and who know s- it might be cheap in your case, maybe
you can inquire....

They take your drive apart and analyze with secret methods, reading signals
too weak for consumer-grade storage devices, and they use software
algorithms. this is how they recover from what seems to be irreversably
damaged drive. Obviously FBI can probably read your bad sectors, question
is the $cost.

 

[Kerry Brown]

You need to take ownership then give yourself permission to at least read
the files. Google or Bing for take ownership.

--
Kerry Brown
MS-MVP - Windows Desktop Experience: Systems Administration
http://www.vistahelp.ca/phpBB2/