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Dying disk, recovery suggestions?

A

AbRASiON

Senior member
Anyone got real good experience recovering data?

I know about a few tricks over the years, I've dealt with a few dying drives, some unrecoverable some not.

Anyhow, thing is this drive is a weird one.
No reported bad sectors.
Spindle motor is totally fine, not ceased (so freezer trick is meaningless)
Drive isn't better when cold or hot.

Issue is the drive is reading at /literally/ .05kb/s in some sectors of the disk, it'll "I/O ERROR" in Ztree when copying some files. Others - it copies without a care in the world (slow as HELL!) but it'll copy them, no errors.

I dunno if it's mid sector remapping or what - chckdsk simply isn't an option. Takes long enough on a 3TB disk that's running 100MB/s - current speeds it just dies / drops out.
Any ideas? The data isn't SUPER SUPER important but I'm happy to leave it in a caddy running for weeks on end if some kind of tool can coax the data off.

Also - anyone seen this before? SUPER slow disk? What could it be?
 
generally it means that sections of the disk are about to be marked as bad, but it is not quite at that point.

Some programs will work and keep trying to get through and copy your data, but a full surface scan / checkdisk is required to try and force the bad clusters "bad" so that the drive will stop using them.

I recently had this issue as my storage system reported issues when I run a scan disk (the program is called stablebit scanner). It does have a recovery option and will re-try the near bad clusters to get your data, but once you have done that you need to run "chkdsk /f" (and it takes a while) and it will hopefully force the bad areas bad (ie: it failes the check).

In the end it could be a issue that the driving is dieing, or it just be that you are not allowing the drive to turn off before powering it down.
 
I want a tool like this stablebit scanner but just to run on one path under NTFS - just keep trying and trying to pull the data, somehow - reckon that's possible?
What's that really really old disk scanning tool which used to spend days messing with the drive reading data? Spinwrite?
 
I never used spinwrite so can not say. The stablebit scanner can be set to retry iffy areas several times (default is 10), so depending on how bad it is it might take a while, but I think it can keep retrying as long as you have the time to wait.

There are probably others, but I am happy with this program.
 
Yeah I've got it in an external desktop dock already - one of those StarTech ones, really handy - I'm not having physical spin up / down issues, just the slow spot.

Anyone had luck with Spinrite?
 
Ahhh yeah those tools generally scan the disk surface for deleted files and simply "unmark them" as deleted - that works for partitions too.
This is unfortunately a bit deeper than that, the software filesystem is fine, the physical hardware (for the most part) is fine, if I were to have a guess, I'd almost say the alignment of the heads was off by like 3 atoms or something ridiculous.
 
AbRASiON said:
I want a tool like this stablebit scanner but just to run on one path under NTFS - just keep trying and trying to pull the data, somehow - reckon that's possible?
What's that really really old disk scanning tool which used to spend days messing with the drive reading data? Spinwrite?
Click to expand...

You could probably use ddrescue to image your drive instead of using Spinrite.
 
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