A good hard disk repair software?

Those tools are hardware error detectors/correctors, not structure error detector/correctors. If the hardware indicates that there is not data error, but the bytes in that data block are all screwed up (wrong values), then you have screwed up data. If you image that screwed up data (no errors detected in the bits/bytes while imaging), all you're gonna do is retore that same screwed up data and the system will act accordingly... it will blow up. If EXECUTABLEs have the wrong data in them, they will not run correctly and may do some bad things. If the data values in some files are just plain wrong, then the system will not BOOT correctly and you'll be left with nothing that you can use... reliably.

The tools you mention will try and correct data for detectable errors. SpinRite/HDDregenerator/Drevitalize do this for hardware level errors, ChkDsk will try and do this for Windows file structure software level errors if those errors are in the FILE STRUCTURE itself, not in the file content that the file structure refers to. Any errors in the file content and not provided along with a hardware detected error will pretty much trash your system if they are in files the system needs to run with.

That's what I mean about structure errors... bit/byte level changes that have not been detected as changes, these can trash a system, especially coming from a hardware compromised subsystem like those RAID disk arrays you're having trouble with.

 

Pigitus, this from the Drevitalize process description...

"Additionally, the revitalize/refresh slow sectors option should never be run on drives with important data."

The reason it says this (and HDDregenerator and SpinRite work the same) is that the method(s) that it uses to make the malfunctioning HDD sector work once again, may easily change the data content of that HDD sector essentially making it totally invalid for its eventual use, while removing the hardware's capability of flagging that HDD sector as being in error... basically making that HDD sector "whole" once again (error free) but now having changed data in it. The WHOLE HDD sector can now be reused for storage purposes, but the previously contained data cannot, reliably.

An MP3 with changed data may "pop" when it's being played, a JPG image file may get scrogged with half the picture being basically unviewable, a TXT file may have a few spelling errors in it... but an EXE or a DLL file just may reach out and make data changes to the wrong part of memory its dealing with causing the next item in the process chain to completely explode. These are the most serious kinds of structure errors... making your system basically unBOOTable, or even SAFE for that matter if you do get it running. Who knows what those further processes will do when executed.

 

Thanks. This situation is confusing. Spinrite saw no problem in the RAID hard disks. Chekdsk did not either. On the other hand, Acronis TI saw bad sectors and listed their numbers. Last month when I still could boot into Windows, the Intel utlity monitoring the RAID array warned that one of the two disks was failing. So two software could not find physical damage, and two other software could. One day I'll finally know what was going on. Maybe.

In the meantime, I tried a trick on the Macrium restore. I let the Windows login page stay on for a very long time without entering the code. The disk-use light was working (as usual, since Windows takes advantage of this down time -- the time the user takes to enter a login ID -- to keep loading itself). I wanted to see if a blue screen would occur after letting it wait long enough. No BSOD. After logging in, I worked on for hours and there was no BSOD anymore. I am not trying to be spiritual, but it's as if the system has been gradually healing itself since the restoration.

Therefore, despite all the BSODs and tricks that it took to slowly get the system usable again, I think that Macrium R did a little miracle here. It restoried a system from a FAILING, NON-BOOTABLE HD RAID. Does this mean that I escaped the GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT law? Not fully. I noticed yesterday that I lost some programs. No trace of them. It's as if they had never been installed.

The next step was supposed to be the restoration of the BootIt image. But I just discovered that BootIt does not restore. So I'll have to restore with a trial copy of its cousin, Image for Windows.

 

Update. It was at first a pain to restore the image done by BootIt Bare Metal. The restore was done by Image for DOS (both products by Terabyte Inc.) First, I could neither image nor restore with a USB disk. Using USB freezes the system, and the company knows it. Fortunately, these programs work with the Firewire interface, so I imaged to -- and restored from -- a Firewire disk. Second pain was that the restore demanded a 700 GB destination, even though there were really about 100GB of system/apps files to retore. Macrium directly shrunk the restore into a 240GB SSD without complaining, but BSODs keep occuring frequently when I try to use the restored image. The Terabyte products produced a restore that worked without a single BSOD. Impressive, given that the image was done from a failing RAID 0 HD array. So the best restore under those difficult conditions was from Terabyte. Macrium Reflect came second, because its restore booted at least sometimes, but with unpredictable BSODs. R-Drive produced an unworkable image. Acronis quit making the image after reporting many sector errors in the original HDs.

HOWEVER, I lost programs in the Macrium and Terabyte restores. Those programs vanished. No trace of them anywhere. No registry entry. And a few surviving programs did not work well. But most of what was left seemed to work well with Terabyte. Maybe I'll discover later that some features don't work. Still impressive, however, given that the job was to image basket case disks. Now I have a Wndows XP systems that works along with most programs.

 

Repairs can be destructive, so I recovered what I could before the repair stage. Now I will put the RAID 0 back in and try to repair it with some of the software proposed above. Just out of curiosity, I want to see whether I can get more complete images.

 

It isn't uncommon that an IFD operation freezes during the menu process when USB is involved. Use Image for Linux as it doesn't rely on the BIOS to detect the USB HD so there is no freeze. Many of us prefer IFL over IFD as it is faster on our systems.

When using IFD/IFL/IFW you can select a partition and click Information. The MiB to Restore is the sector spread and indicates the smallest partition you can restore into. You can reduce the MiB to Restore by clicking Compact and choosing a value in MiB. This allows you to restore into a smaller partition.

 

I think I checked "Compact" but the job could not be restored to a 240 GB disk. I don't know whether you read the beginning of the thread, but the data were 100 GB in a 1 TB disk. So there were lots of empty space. IFD may have tried to do a "kind of" sector-by-sector restore. Despite the compression, it could not fit the 100GB data in 240 GB.

But maybe I saw that screen you were referring to and let it slide by, because I was afraid to manually specify something different than the program wanted to do by default.

Anyway thanks for your good tips. I will heed them next time.

 

The TeraByte apps do sector based restores so if your 100 GB of data was scattered across 1000 GB of sectors then you would require a 1000 GB partition to restore. But if you compacted the data to say 110 GB then the image of that partition would restore to a 110 GB partition.

 

Clear. Thanks!

 

Compacting would need to include a wipe-free-space operation. Otherwise a disk imager won't compress those un-used sectors down to nothing.

 

Keatah, the "compacting" referred to by Brian compacts USED sectors only, and the follow-on image, not done in ALL SECTOR mode only does the compacted "used" sectors.

 

Drive Snapshot does report which sectors are damaged and you get a log file. The only drawback is that you don't know which files are concerned.

 

Punch those sector numbers into Runtime's Disk Explorer utility. Then you can find the current file that belongs to the sector you're looking at.

 

Good to know ! Thanks.

Oh, I see it's not free, but it works 30 days, plenty enough to see what are the files involved.

 

I'm surprised there haven't been any freeware utilities that do this function. In the following example, the file is split into 5 fragments. And occupies the following sectors.

You type (or select): Filename.xyz
And the program responds: Filename.xyz makes use of the following sectors:
400000 - 400125
873344 - 874299
1000444
1000670
1001778

To be truly useful in troubleshooting a borked disk, it also has to be able report what file belongs to a specified sector # that you enter.

You type: 873500
And the program responds: Sector #873500 belongs to Filename.xyz

 

If I understand correctly I think HDView might do the first part - you can search by filename, or press F1 while hovering over the map and it will show this information.

I don't think it will do the second part though.

http://home.arcor-online.de/alexander.freudenberg/dev_en.htm

 

It does the first part though in very tedious and clumsy fashion. Problems with having to move the mouse, you can easily loose your spot. It does not do the second part at all.

This second part is important when you use a program that scans for and reports bad sectors. You need to know what file is affected.

 

For the first part I think you can search instead of hovering over the map.

 

DiskView can do both; double-click on a cluster to get more information. OSForensics can do the latter.

 

Update.

Had I known what I now know, I would have named this thread differently. A better title would have been, "Difficulties in recovering a Windows system located on failing RAID 0 disks."

The goal was to recover a working Windows XP system with all installed application software. Personal data are not an issue here.

Since repairs could damage the information to be recovered, imaging is the first step -- and perhaps the only thing to do. As shown below, the repair software were useless (except for CHKDSK).

 

Farstone's Total Recovery Tools was worthy. It also recovered the failing system, even though the results were a bit less stable than IFD's and IFL's.

Overall, I ended up going farther with Terabyte's suite, but I found it quirky. First, you better install IFW in its default folder, otherwise some scripts will not run. To fix this, you must open the script file to type in your chosen installation path. Also, while one of my recovery disks worked well on the original XP machine, other machines could not read it (unrecognized format!). Very strange. Then, at one point, only IFD could recognize the defective RAID 0 array; IFL could no longer recognize it (maybe the array was getting worse?). But IFD freezes when USB external drives are used. Fortunately, it can work with Firewire drives, so I did my best backups using Firewire. For all the problems it gave me, it is nevertheless the suite that imaged and recovered the best in that difficult situation.

Acronis never produced a successful image in this situation. HOWEVER, its reporting of errors -- where no other imager reported any -- was very useful. Because it reported wrong sectors at the back end of the logical disk, a solution came to mind:

1. Defragment and pack all used files at the error-free front end.
2. Shrink the volume from 1 TB to about 108 GB at the front end.
3. Image the smaller, healthier front end.

O&O's SPACE option packed all the files at the front end, and Terabyte's Partition Works did the partition shrinking. As a result, recoveries became more stable (less BSODs, and CHKDSK tended to fix BSODs). Even Acronis reported just one "bad" sector instead of the slew of bad sectors it reported before (but it still did not produce a successful image).

Recovery of XP in Safe Mode with IFD on the shrunk partition was the best result. No BSODs regardless of time spent in Safe Mode.

Conclusion: A RAID 0 that could no longer boot produced bootable and somewhat workable recoveries. That was interesting.

 

As to the RAID disks' problem, no diagnostic software got to the bottom of it.

Here were the original messages produced by the Intel disk monitoring utility:

1. " A drive in a RAID 0 volume is failing. Try to back up data immediately."

2. "RAID volume failed, but a backup may be possible. Please try to back up data immediately."

Spinrite did not find or fix any problem.

At one point, while the RAID was passive, right-clicking on the RAID volume in Windows Explorer + Properties + Tools + Error checking concluded that the disk had errors. Windows recommended running CHKDSK, but CHKDSK found nothing wrong. Contradiction.

Acronis Tue Image 2014 kept reporting flawed sectors on the disk, Chkdsk /F /R /V never found bad sectors. It would only make minor repairs (like fixing security indexes) and would declare the disk healthy. Contradiction again.

The trial copy of HDD Regenerator found absolutely nothing wrong with the RAID volume: 0 bad sector, 0 delay. And Regenerator checked the whole 931 GB, which included the back end where Acronis said there were bad sectors! Contradiction yet again.

The only repairs done were of security descriptors and indexes by CHKDSK /F /R /V.

I am tempted to conclude that the reported RAID volume failure must be in the internal electronics of one of its HDs. The failure has not damaged the disk yet, according to most software -- except that Acronis TI 2014 reports bad sectors.

 

IFD/IFL and MR can't exclude folders from an image.

Acronis supposedly can, but the size of the image with and without the folder is the same (by the way, this was an image in a different computer). That folder is huge. Excluding it should have saved about 200 GB. No saving. So I don't believe Acronis can exclude a folder.

Total Recovery Tools is also supposedly capable of excluding a path, but I could not test that on a Surface Pro 3. TRT is not ready for Windows 8.1 yet.

Do you know of a Win 8.1 compatible imager that really can exclude a folder with a huge tree of subfolders and files?

 

Drive Snapshot ? Also Paragon Backup Tools I think.

 

IFW/IFD/IFL can do this when run from a command line. It works well. See page 154 in the IFW manual (/exlist=filename). Page 123 in IFD manual. Page 116 in IFL manual.