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hd - "unreadable sector" ?

J

jwocky

Member
Ok, so I plugged in my dead hd (died a couple months ago) last night just to see if I could pull anything off of it. I was able to get everything off the second partition on the drive (albeit very slowly), but can't access the main partition. Upon bootup when I let the system do a checkdisk on the drive, it tells me that it can't read certain sectors (a lot of them, and I just rebooted as it looked like it was just going to keep listing them numerically for a long time). I assume these bad sectors are on the main partition, preventing me from accessing it.

My question is there any way to overcome these unreadable sectors, or does this indicate that there's an actual physical problem with the main partition? Please help! Thanks!


*background: hd died 2 months ago when it made clicking noises and wouldn't boot. Last night it didn't make any clicking noises; can access a secondary partition on the drive, but not the main partition*
 
Click of Death.

RMA the drive if it's under warranty. You've already lost the data in that unrecoverable area. Put it on scandisk and leave it for it's 10-12 hours, pull off what isn't damaged, and junk the drive if you can't RMA.

- M4H
 
I know that freezing a hd is a possible low-tech attempt to cure clicking hard drives, but would freezing possibly cure my problems here?
 
Freezing a hardrive can sometimes get it operational for a few hours at max after it starts clicking and becomes completely non-functional. However, after freezing a hard drive and using it for a few hours at max, it's almost gaurenteed to die completely and forever afterwards.

It sounds like the data on your drive is seriously damaged from bad sectors. Your best bet would be to try some hard-core data recovery software to copy off what you can from the drive in the state it's in now.

I had VERY good luck at my job a few years ago retrieving data off of damaged partitions with software called Tiramasu. They had different verisons for Fat32 and NTFS .. I can't recall who made it, but I had an unreadable partition and it sucked almost all of the files off of it in tact.

Another, more hard core thing to check out might be Spinrite at www.grc.com. This is hard-core disk analaysis/bad sector recovery/remapping software that might be able to get the partition into a more stable state to copy data off of.

Then again you could just get your files from your backups that every good computer user keeps, right ;-)

 
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