Recover files from HDD with bad sectors.

[TBird]

I have recently tried out RecoverMyFiles and have been impressed at what it has found from a USB External HDD which I dropped and could no longer read. It had lost the partition and could only appear as a RAW format.

Then I did a Fast Format Search, as mentioned on this forum, and after about 4 days I got a list of all the files that it could find. I assume that this time delay is due to the fact that it is a USB connection and that the HDD has bad sectors within it.

I then purchased your product (version 3.94) and it managed to get some .jpg files out successfully but some other jpgs took nearly a day to retrieve and some, not surprisingly, were corrupt.

Is there any way to speed this process up? Would formatting the HDD to NTFS and then attempting a recovery work? I don't really want to pull my laptop apart just to get the HDD connected via the IDE if avoidable but I gather with the bad sectors in the HDD I doubt that it would improve things dramatically.

Thanks in advance for any help that you can give.

[GDH]

Bad sectors are real pain as we have to rely on Windows to try and read them and it can be painfully slow.

The best option is to click on the OPTIONS button and put a tick in the box for "prompt for start cluster". This will allow you to select where you start the search. Using this technique you will be able to quickly test different parts of the drive to see what you can get back whilst jumping over the bad sector problems.