HELP! About to lose very important data

vipergrm

vipergrm

vipergrm

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Joined
12 Mar 2007
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282
Location
UK
Hi guys,

I am in real trouble. I just replaced my motherboard (see profile). I have set up a mirror (2x 250gb drives) and a single 250gb hard drive (all Hitachi Deskstar). As the mirror required me to format both drives, I went ahead with this as I had my important data backed up on the remaining drive. To my absolute horror, there appears to be bad sectors on this drive and every time I try to copy from this drive to my mirror drive my PC blue screens and restarts. I am pretty certain this is the hard drive as I have tried running Ghost (read fail errors) Spinrite (freezes) and some other HDD diagnostic tools which indicate bad sectors on the drive. I understand these can be recovered but so far I have had no success.

Can anyone advise of the best HDD sector repair tool available? This would be devastating if I lost this data. I should also point out that I am running a fresh install of XP on a seperate 40GB HDD.

Thank you for any help you can give me ;)
 
Have you tried doing a a chk dsk? I am sure that black lists any bad sectors - I had an old 80gb seagate which developed some bad sectors and kept bsoding my pc and a chk dsk fixed it.
 
If I was you I'd image that disk using something like Linux "dd" pronto. You can tell dd to ignore read errors. While this means that some files might end up corrupted, it also means that the majority of your stuff should come through unscathed. If you're interested in trying I'll post some instructions. (Download this so long in that case: http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?wpid=1&front_id=12)

Cheers
 
Guys, thanks a lot. I haven't tried to run chkdsk actually. I'll do that now.

ByteJuggler - I've tried imaging with every tool I can think of but I didn't notice any that ignored the bad sectors (Ghost, Drive Image etc)

Is this tool you are advising easy enough to follow? Thanks guys, I appreciate your help. I would be devastated if I lost this stuff!
 
Now I am REALLY NO SWEARING myself. I ran chkdsk and I'm getting the following errors:

File record segment 512 is unreadable
File record segment 513 is unreadable
File record segment 514 is unreadable
File record segment 515 is unreadable
File record segment 516 is unreadable
And so on...

The drive appears to be getting worse. I can barely access it at all within Windows as my PC will blue screen... Oh deary deary me :mad:
 
If you're somewhat technically minded then using dd isn't that hard. However if you're expecting a one-click solution, then dd isn't it.

That said, it's not really rocket science, and I'll try and help you if you want to try that route. The best might be for us to chat on MSN or Skype or somesuch sometime and I can try to help you like that. The other option is to send the disk off to a data recovery company, but that's gonna cost you.

Anyway, I'd strongly suggest you take a snapshot of the dying disk as soon as you possibly can to prevent further corruption/data loss. The important thing is to stop using/trying to correct the filesystem while on the dying disk. You'll only make things worse if the disk is dying and you keep trying to repair it.
 
Not advice to give out ad lib... thats a last ditch method that needs to be done correctly and for specific types of drive failure...
 
Sorry for the late update guys, but I got it sorted thankfully. I ran Norton Ghost and there was an option in the Misc settings to force the image even if the hard drive has bad sectors. I was able to copy to one of my good drives. I have since pulled out the faulty drive and have now mirrored the data with my remaining drive so all seems well. So far, I haven't come accross any corrupted files yet so I'm hoping I got it copied just in time.

I ran Spinrite just before disconnecting the faulty drive and it showed numerous bad sectors. RMA me thinks :D

Thanks for the support guys. Much appreciated ;)
 
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