External USB HDD with Bad Sectors

[TBird]

HI,

I have recently placed a post about recovering from a USB HDD with bad sectors and did get a reply about it. However, I do have a few other issues that I would appreciate some suggestions or ideas on.

Firstly, I did a Fast File Search on it, using 3.94, and it managed to find files and folders. The problem was due to bad sectors it took about 5 days to find them. A lot of the files were corrupt, which I assume is again due to the bad sectors. Therefore I would like to know how best to fix these bad sectors, if at all possible.

Secondly, as I dropped the disk it is no longer recognised as a NTFS partition but RAW. Your app managed to decipher it properly but 5 days to do a scan is too long. Your reply to my post said to change something in the options to manually skip over bad sectors but I wondered how viable it is to actually deliberately format the drive and attempt a recovery from that? Would I then be able to fix the bad sectors after that?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. And I have, as of yesterday, upgraded to 3.95.

Thank you.

[GDH]

It is not usually possible to fix bad sectors. A bad sector is usually a physical problem with the disk, eg. the magnetic media for that sector does not work.

All hard drives have bad sectors, even new ones that come straight out of the factory. When the drive is prepared, the low level format instructions tell the drive to ignore the bad sectors, so that any problem areas of the drive are not used.

If your drive has developed a lot of bad sectors then it is probably that its life expectancy is not very long and you would be brave to continue storing important data on it without a very reliable backup solution.

You might like to try some further searches with Recover My Files to try and get all possible files off the drive before you start experimenting with it. If you click on manually select options on the first wizard screen, and go to the ADVANCED tab, put a tick in the box for "prompt for start cluster". Then you can start and stop the search at different locations on the disk, trying to skip the bad sectors.

Once you are happy that you have recovered every possible file that you need, then you can format the drive and start experimenting.

[TBird]

Once again, thanks for your prompt reply, explanations and suggestions.

This is actually a good product and this forum is excellent too so please keep up the good work.

Regards.