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Dying drive - what copy tool?

A

afzal

Junior Member
Hi all

I have a dying Maxtor Maxline Plus II 250GB 7Y250P0 (from a Lacie external USB drive)

Unfortunately, I have photos on it that I didn't get around to backing up (classic error 101).

GetDataBack hangs on it, and Spinrite recommends copying it first. There, though, is the rub. Smartdrive is reporting imminent failure (Attribute #05). Windows sees it as an unformatted drive (it had NTFS structure).

I have two problems:

1. What tool should I use for trying to copy it that is least likely to cause it to give up althogether and won't suffer a software crash due to Windoz telling it the drive is bad? XCOPY? Norton Ghost (with compression or smart copying?)? Do any of these circumvent WIndows and do it at a Bios level? Can I make them ignore bad sector errors?

2. My second disk is a Samsung Spinpoint 250GB. Although both drives are 250GB, the Samsung apparently has 1GB less space than the Maxtor. My first attempt at copying with Norton 10 aborted with Norton saying the destination disk was too small. Do I need to go purchase a 300GB disk?

Thanks in advance for any help or hints.
 
Norton Ghost should do it, and if the drive that's dying is your boot drive, the target should be immediately bootable, too. You may get copies of damaged data, but whatever's damaged beyond repair is already gone.

If you continue to get the message that the target is too small, you may have to check the options to force it to override that, but as long as you have less data on the source than the total capacity of the target drive, you should be OK.

The most direct approach is to use Ghost to create a bootable floppy, and work from that level. If Ghost 10 doesn't support floppy drives, Ghost 2003 does, and I believe it is included as a separte program in newer versions of Ghost and System Works Pro.
 
The drive is not my boot drive, lukily, but a drive for my photos.

Windows sees the drive, but thinks it needs formatting :-(
 
Originally posted by: afzal
GetDataBack hangs on it, ...
Click to expand...

What does this mean?
Does GetDataBack give an error, stop running, or quit?
Or does GetDataBack continue to process, taking an abnormally long time, and not respond?

If GetDataBack is continuing to process, I would let it continue to run and see what it does. It may take some time for GetDataBack to work through the drive errors and this can often seem to take forever. It can easily take several hours to even a full day or two to completely work through any drive errors. I have yet to see GetDataBack actually fail.

There are basically two options here.
  1. make an image of the drive and save this image to another hard drive.
  2. run a data recovery tool such as GetDataBack to recognize your data, then copy this data to another drive.

It is possible the drive could fail during further use so the best thing to do is to perform the action with the least amount of access or run time for the hard drive. However, if the drive is failing with the inability to read certain sectors, I believe but am not 100% certain, that a data recovery tool will work harder to attempt recovery of those failing sectors where a drive imaging application may skip that unreadable sector and move on.

Sometimes the sectors are physically damaged, making it difficult for the read/write head to physically move past the damaged sector.

It may be a situation where the data on those damaged sectors is lost anyways and it may be better to skip those damaged sectors to recover the data on the rest of the drive.

With all this in mind, the best action to take would be to make an image of the drive to save any data first in case the drive may fail.
Then run GetDataBack to see if it can recover any more data from any possibly damaged drive sectors.
 
Thanks Slowlearner for pointing me to that great source of utilities.

Now the question is which to use?

Taking into account the message from chusteczka who is, I think, spot on, my immediate concern is to get at the easily accessible files and save those off the drive, avoiding trouble areas and minimizing the risk of total disk failure as much as possible.

The drive is currently sitting in my fridge (following the advice from another forum 🙂 ) awaiting my decision on how to proceed. When connected, however, it is recognized by Windows but no files can be seen (Windows wants to format it).

I'm also faced with another dilema, The drive is a 250GB, and my other 250GB is a Samsung spinpoint. The issue is that the Samsung has 1GB less space available than the Maxtor. Now, there was about 170-200 GB used on the Maxtor, but with no file system left, and without running GetDataBack, it looks like I need to do a raw image, and so I have a space problem.

Should I buy, I wonder, something like a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB/300GB? Do any of the low-level disk copy programs allow me to just take the 200GB from the outter cylinders (I don't think the drive was ever above 200GB, so it's unlikely the inner ones where used).

Back to the utilities to use. The makers of DiskImage also have a Raw Copy program
but it seems quite primitive. They also have something called unstoppable copier, but I'm not sure if this is only for disks and not hard drives.

Lexundesigns DrvImagerXP looks interesting, but can such an imager do anything with a drive reporting no files? Do I need to go to the cloner version, DrvClonerXP?



 
Thanks chusteczkafor the sound advice.

GetDataBack stopped, reporting the smartdrive imminent failure dialogue. At that point I desisted from going further and put the drive in a water tight bag in the fridge.

As I mentioned in another post, I think I can't make an image as Windows wants to format the drive (can't see the file system) so I suppose I need to clone the drive. There, my problem is that my other drive is 1GB smaller (Samsung spinpoint p120s). So before trying to clone I guess I need to go buy another drive (Maxtor Diamondmax 10 250GB? 300GB?Other 300GB drive?)

 
Originally posted by: afzal
... So before trying to clone I guess I need to go buy another drive (Maxtor Diamondmax 10 250GB? 300GB?Other 300GB drive?)
Click to expand...

It seems a hard drive purchase is necessary. I would recommend a Seagate rather than a Maxtor. Last year I purchased two Maxtor drives for a socket 939 nVidia nForce4 chipset. One drive worked fine, without any problems and the other drive had problems. When I attempted to use the Maxtor PowerMax utility to diagnose the issue, it became apparent that Maxtor does not support the nVidia nForce4 northbridge chipset. Maybe this is not the chipset you wish to connect the drive to, I am not sure.

Maxtor PowerMax download
Note: PowerMax v 4.21 will not detect ATA or SATA hard disks connected to embedded or add in RAID controllers, NVIDIA Force 4, VIA KT 600 and KT800 chipsets. If the hard disk is connected to an unsupported controller, it will have to be moved to an alternate system, or controller for diagnosis.
Click to expand...
 
The machine on which I'll be doing the recovery is an intel 915g chipset 775 socket machine, but afterwards I'll be transfering it to a new machine I'm about to build which will be either sock 939 or am2 nforce chipset (I'm looking to do some overclocking on an opteron 165 and then install a raid 5 with at least 3 drives).

I have to admit to prefering samsung or seagate over maxtor, and my plan had been to do a 4x samsung spinpoint p120s 250gb. If I have to buy a 300gb, then I'd like to go with something that has good performance (the samsung t133s isn't particularly good, unlike the p120s).

 
A quick thought.

What I really want to recover is all the tifs in a particular folder structure. Instead of doing a raw clone of the drive, are there tools I could use to just try to retrieve that material?
 
download a live cd of ubuntu and boot into it. then just drag your files from the dying drive over to your main drive (if it's big enough).

I used this to save over 3000 photos on a dying laptop drive.

similar situation to yours.

 
OK, one more question.

I've been told that ubuntu has issues with writing to an NTFS partition. Should I reformat my target drive to FAT32 before I try recovering from my dying source drive?

 
Originally posted by: afzal
... I've been told that ubuntu has issues with writing to an NTFS partition. Should I reformat my target drive to FAT32 before I try recovering from my dying source drive?
Click to expand...
This is exactly correct if you intend to use a Linux based recovery tool such as Ubuntu LiveCD. Above, Slowlearner recommended the use of UBCD4Win. This tool can be used similarly to the Ubuntu LiveCD and will not have this issue with writing to an NTFS filesystem since UBCD4Win is based on the WinXP operating system.

Here are a few of the better known options.

[*]Rescue Disks[/u]
 
My vote goes to using Ghost 2003 (bootable floppy), and the "-ir" (image raw) switch. I've used that a couple of times to save failing HDs. If a sector is unreadable, it will move on. (I think that may require an additional switch, which I've forgotten.)
 
Thanks a lot (again).

The choices are numerous, I see. I'm OS agnostic on this one, I just want to maximise the chances of recovery.

Under linux I see there is a tool called ddrescue. It has the nice attribute of first grabbing what isn't giving errors and then going back and trying the rest. Sounds like a good place to start! It seems that the windows based tools may (in some cases) allow for the same, but not obvious always how to force this behaviour.

Irrespective, I've burnt copies of ubuntu and ubct4win and will experiment a bit on another drive before taking my Maxtor out of the fridge.


 
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