Imaging w/ Bad Sectors?

[h16h]

Hi, thank you for your time. I am attempting to image a drive with TrueIMage but it has many bad sectors. The status just hangs, last night i set it to clone, 12 hours later it was still saying 58min remaining.
At every attempt to run CHKDSK , my machine seems to lock up when it reaches those sectors.
The drive's information is crucial and is in depserate need for backing up before the drive completley fails.
Any Suggestions?

-rick

[h16h]

please, any info is appreciated.

[gfilitti]

Well if you can't get through the CHKDSK without locking up, that drive is trashed. Best thing I can recommend is slaving that drive intoa test rig or another PC and try copying all the data over. Then hope you don't get errors or corruption.

You may also benefit from putting the drive in the freezer in an anti static bag for an hour and trying to copy from it then. That's usually if the controller circuitry is bad but it may help...

[h16h]

My mistake for not mentioning earlier:
I can still use the drive and the files on there, im guessing its a few files/folders that are corrupted but the drive contains over 3000 folders (needle in a haystack?)

Is there any option or software i can use to "Skip what it cannot read/copy"
I did hit Ignore ALL when trueimage gave the first error...

What do you think? Thanks again.

[OldITGuy]

Is this drive also the system drive (probably c?
Have you tried backing up just files and folders and not trying to do a full image? I understand why you would want a full image, but as a hedge against disaster if the drive goes toes up, a backup of files and folders might just be a way to save all your data.

Another, less elegant, solution would be to copy your data from the bad drive to another attached drive or to a networked drive. At least that approach would give you an opportunity to hit "skip" whenever you encountered a file that was written to a bad sector.

Although it may sound a little bizarre, don't totally dismiss gfilitti's idea of putting the drive in the freezer. That has worked for me on many occasions. Put the drive in a ziplock bag, and leave it in the freezer for about 30 minutes. Then remove it from the freezer and hook it up to the computer. Don't take the time to mount it in the case, just lay it on the floor or a box, connect the cables, and start the computer. Try to create an image immediately.

[seekforever]

If the drive is formatted FAT32 instead of NTFS you can use XCOPY with the appropriate switches to copy everything including subdirectories:


C:\windows\command\xcopy32.exe C:\*.* D:\ /H/C/E/K (space between D:\ and first switch, no spaces between switches. Space between * and D. This copies everything from C to D.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is an equivalent for NTFS since this requires a Win98 system or startup disk.

I would immediately do what others have suggested. Start copying your personal data files off the drive, most important ones first. I also would tend to just use Explorer to do it rather than any program that relies on clever tricks and formatting. If something screws up a proprietary archive then you may not be able to recover anything from it.

[02befree]

Similar situation..
While creating an image of a drive that was suspect of going bad, I immediately booted into TI and created an image, but halfway during the process it said it couldn't read from a sector and gave me the option to retry or ignore, or ignore all. If I can ignore bad sectors, will the image do me any good?? I just want the image so I can restore certain files from it. OR shoud I just star copying important data to a network drive, etc. (or I could slave it and do the same. Suggestions?? Time is of the essence I guess if the drive is going bad, right?....

[bodgy]

Out of interest, which switch did you use with chkdsk /f or /r ?

If you used /f - use /r it does or attempts to do a more thorough job.


Colin

[starsfan09]

Bad Sector reports can mean 2 kinds of Bad Sectors.
1. Software Bad Sectors = Usually means corruption in software on the HD.
2. Physical Bad Sectors = A Diagnostics Tool reports this. This usually means the HD is going out.

After doing what Seekforever, and bodgy suggested (backing up you Data, and then running "Chkdsk X: /R" on your Drive), and you still get bad sector reports, download the Diagnostics Tool from your HD manufacturer. Run all Tests on the HD that the Diagnostics Tool has to offer.
Sometimes, this can Repair the HD, and sometimes...it can't. If the Diagnostic Tool reports Bad Sectors after running the Tests 2 times, you can bet it's "Physical Bad Sectors". This means the HD will eventually go out soon. Therefore, it should be replaced.

Making an Image, and then finding out about Bad Sectors afterwords, usually means the Image contains these bad sectors. I don't recommend using this Image. You should get all "software" Bad Sector reporting taken care of Before the Image is made.
IMO... a good way of doing this ...is running "Chkdsk", and then "Defrag" (about 6-7 times) right BEFORE making a Full Image.

[tachyon42]

Sometimes even the manufacturer's diagnostics report that a disk is totally unusable.
I have successfully used SpinRite 6 to resurrect such a disk.
It's a little expensive but if the data is really valuable then it's worth it.
SpinRite works by analysing the magnetic recording on the disk and rewriting the information.
Of course, if the disk is really failing mechanically then no software can be guaranteed to help.
Try to get as much off it before trying SpinRite. SpinRite might be able to rewrite some of the data to help you recover even more although anything might happen as the disk physically fails.