I have an external hard drive that is starting to fail; it has some bad sectors. It’s a 1 TB Fujitsu Siemens case with a Western Digital hard drive inside.
Eventually I will backup the whole drive with some backup/imaging software, but I don’t have the free space to do that. At the moment I want to copy some video files, but I’m not able to because the drive hangs while copying a certain file, and disconnects. If I try to resume (using TeraCopy, great tool by the way) it hangs again and disconnects…
I don’t seem to easily find a tool to copy that one file (and maybe others later), preferably freeware of course.
Another problem:
I have run
chkdsk /ron that drive, and about 4 hours in it was at 1% (phase 1,2 and 3 were done in a few minutes, but phase 4 took hours to get from 0). At the moment I don’t have access to a PC that can run long enough to get the job done in one sitting.Is there a better tool out there so I could cut this job in pieces (or faster, but that seems unlikely)?
Solution:
Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier recovers files from disks with physical damage and allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method, most types of files can be made useable even if some parts of the file were not recoverable in the end.
Unstoppable Copier is freeware.
If that doesn’t help, try fixing the drive with HDD Regenerator and salvage your files.
HDD Regenerator is shareware (US$39.95, money-back guarantee) and is try before you buy.
PS: I have pretty good experiences with this program, but of course success depends on the severity of the damage.