What is the best program to save a dying harddrive?
 

By getting as much data as possible copied onto another drive?
Windows copy fails horribly at this because its so slow and a single problem aborts the whole thing..

I would pull it out and put it in an external case. I have heard everything from putting the drive in the freezer and also to shake it a little if the drive gets stuck while copying.

All you can do is rescue as much as possible before......

You could try getting a forensic tool such as FTK Imager, or EnCase and doing an "acquisition" of your hard drive to recover some of the data to another hard drive. EnCase works from a live boot CD, so if you use that and another hard drive, I'd imagine you'd be able to recover a fair bit.

Then again, I'm not forensics expert.

Symantec Ghost, then ghost it to a new drive. Make sure to turn on the options to force clone, and ignore erros. Saved plenty of peoples pc that way

i started that program yesterday actually.. its still going.
im trying to save a 250gb hard drive and all i see (so far) is 3gb .v2i file

am i doing this right?

i started that program yesterday actually.. its still going.
im trying to save a 250gb hard drive and all i see (so far) is a 3gb .v2i file

am i doing this right?

bumpbump

Try ACRONIS' disk backup software. You can even image the whole disk ie., clone it.

hey i think trying to use a disk intensive copy or any of that shit thats going to retry bad sectors will likely end the drive sooner.

I would try and use XCOPY

/C Continues copying even if errors occur.

something like from a CMD / Dos prompt
xcopy /s /C BADDRIVE:\*.* c:\BACKUPFOLDER

dammit :(

icqing you now

Please post the solution, I know more people would be interested in your suggestion..

Ghost has saved my ass a couple times..great utility

I had good luck with Ontrac:thumbsup

Send me your porno botos...I want to beat the shit out of gay.com and myspace.com and yahoo.chat like you do....got any botnets for sale?


thanks

look for a bootable rescue CD (BartPE). It has several rescue applications on it...

I just had a drive die, now I need to send it out to a company to have it recovered. I tried the freezer, no luck. click click click .. it sucks

Anyone knows a good reliable company that accepts drives with adult on it?

Have you done a drive test to see how many bad sectors there are? If it's clicking away consistently (ie, choking on more than one or two bad sectors) then you may not even have much left to save.

Try Seagate Seatools:

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/sup...oads/seatools/

Download the ISO and burn it to a CD (make sure you burn it in ISO mode, don't just copy the file to the CD). Do a drive short test (DST) then if that succeeds a longer one. Also check to see if SMART has tripped.

BTW, this will test any brand drive although there are some extra features available for Seagates.

Ghost is the shit!

spin-rite

with a lot of experience on recovering mostly ide hdds, spinrite 6.0 is the best program around. i was able to recovere 9 out of 10 hdds.

it will correct majority of bad sectors. make sure S.M.A.R.T. option in BIOS is turned on. this program will recover most of your data. use the last read/recover/write option, which is the slowest by the way. it will take a lot of time to recover data (could be days or even weeks). all depends on how much your data stored there is worth(less).

then you can use Victoria, russian hdd recovery masterpeace (a freeware program), to mark all those sectors bad (use the fastest option, because apperance of bad sectors is a deteriorating and erosive process and it will mark 256 sectors at once as bad).

if your data worths a lot, send your hdd to a company specialized in data recovery. this could cost thousands of dollars and can take weeks to get your data.

in any case, prepare to waste a lot of time on waiting for data to be recovered...

When all of their suggestion fail, this is the final solution (just to get the data)

1. Wrap the HD with a dry towel.

2. Put it inside the freezer (overnight)

3. get it out, connect to the pc quick, and copy as much as you can.

that's the old freezer trick. it worked for me.

Does the freezer trick even work these days? Grabbing data off a drive is working it quite hard, which is going to generate a fair amount of heat within a relatively short period of time.

As an example I have a WD 1TB drive in a caddy, if it's idle then it's barely warm, but when it's doing a backup it gets very hot.

I agree.

How did it go?

What would freezing do to help recover data?..doesn't make sense to me