Eeyore wrote in
:



James Sweet wrote:

There's some really good tools out there, unfortunately I forget the
name of the one I used, but I found a free demo of it online a couple
years ago. Google for data recovery software and try one out. A word of
caution though, if the data is valuable, take the drive to a pro, you
risk destroying it beyond recovery by attempting to recover it
yourself.

Thanks for the input. There's nothing on it of such value that I can't
live without it !

I am however curious since I've not come across such a fault before and
I'd like to attempt a fix if only as an exercise.

I've never previously 'lost' or needed to 're-install' an installation
of Windows you see. Short of total mechanical/electrical failure I'd
like to maintain that record.

I use r-studio to recover data.
Left one drive running last night. Lots of bad sectors 'unable to read
after 10 retries'.

The computer seems to freeze when it is accessing such a drive.
It may take several days to finish making an image of this 76 GB drive.

Then r-studio can scan the image and recover files [except for the data
lost on the bad sectors, of course.

I usually make an image first, for several reasons:
1) it preserves the hard drive for further tries
2) it is faster to recover from the image when there are lots of hardware
failures.
3) you can try different sectoring schemes to recover data when the
directory has been trashed.

As for fixing the drive, a low level format might 'fix' the drive by
teaching it to ignore the bad sectors, but if it has been losing sectors
due to mechanical damage to the disk surface, the problem will continue to
get worse. The drive is unreliable.

Check the mfg web site, the drive may be in warranty!
You may get a free replacement drive.

If the data on the drive is very valuable, there are companies that will
recover data, even from damaged drives. It isn't cheap.

I remember a company in canada that would return the drive repaired with
data recovered for a flat fee of less than 1000 dollars [no charge if they
couldn't recover your drive].




--
bz 73 de N5BZ k

please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an
infinite set.

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