Is there a software tool that you can use for this? You will require more sophisticated software to tackle that situation. It’s always best to just leave the computer and let it finish the job.Īfter the long and sometimes involved process reaches the end, you can now refer to this tutorial to scan your cloned drive for data and eventually recover it.Īnother note: This tutorial will not let you scan the IMAGE file that you saved. The system is going to take some time to create that clone you are after and since it will contain data you are hoping to recover, the time it takes to get through this step will be worth it regardless. You can guesstimate how long it will take with an 8TB drive and you’ll get my point. For example, a 300GB hard drive can take up to 2 hours to copy completely. I’m trying to be funny here but the point I’m making is that this particular part of the process can be um, time-consuming. You may actually run out of popcorn and may need a few additional chores in and around your workspace to occupy you. This is when you can leave the room, grab some popcorn and then sit back down in front of your computer to watch the magic happen. Provided you start with a disk with the same or more capacity of your original disk, you can choose either compressed or uncompressed and neither will have any impact on the ability to recover files. As an alternative option, you could choose to save a copy either compressed (which will save space and reduce the size of the file) or uncompressed (which will use the exact same capacity of your source drive) IMAGE/FILE. This will be the drive where all the sectors will be migrated to. 4 – Select a source drive you want to clone.
1 – Download a free copy of HDD Raw Copy Tool.Or, you can store that IMAGE on another attached external or internal hard drive rather than copying sectors directly onto the drive the conventional way. As an alternative, you may save the copy as an IMAGE file that you will be able to store anywhere on your current disk.
NOTE: You will need a hard drive that has either the same capacity or more in order to successfully make a copy. I have made it an easy to follow, step by step process. Cloning & Data Recovery ProcessĪs soon as you have a good sector by sector copy of your bad sectored drive, you can proceed to use this tutorial to scan it and recover your data. Unfortunately, if that is the case, this tutorial won’t be of much use to you. Should you experience this, it means your drive has suffered a mechanical failure. That is unless the bad sectors have damaged all of the surfaces inside the disk you are trying to save.
In many cases, this can allow you to save your data.
Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have.Here’s a tutorial that is designed to help you make a sector by sector clone of a hard drive that has bad sectors (one, a few or many). low level formatting) and sometimesīy running a **chkdsk /r** in the CMD.Īs for getting the information from the drive if one of the partitions fail, most likely you won't be able to, which is why I'd suggest to make a regular backup of your most important data.
These can be repaired by overwriting the data on the drive with zeroes (a.k.a.
Software bad sectors on the other hand occur when something called an Error Correction Code (ECC) doesn't match the contents of the hard drive.In short, once they appear it's only a matter of time (no way to say how long) until the HDD fails. Hardware ones are caused by physical damage or becoming magnetically fixed, and they are unrepairable.I am not sure what your question is exactly, but one thing I'd recommend for sure will be to look for a replacement drive since there is already a bad sector on your current one.īasically there are two kinds of bad sectors - hardware and software: