Need help backing up data from drive that constantly hangs from bad sectors.

[Shmee]

Agree with others that if you want to recover yourself, best way to do it is to remove from enclosure and use SATA interface, and use a bootable linux utility or something like hirens.

 

[pitz]

ddrescue with the "map" file works awesome for things like this. It'll read what it can first-pass, and then it will try to read the bad blocks. Run it long enough, and eventually you'll have an image file that has everything except a small number of dead areas.

I "recovered" nearly everything off of a Seagate 200gb drive that way, except that we had to stick the Seagate drive in the freezer every 10 minutes to keep it working.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Hmmm... well, I finally got around to using ddrescue and it's a little odd.

It hasn't finished yet, but it actually hasn't detected any errors or bad sectors, BUT the speed is now down to ~100 KB/s.

So I'm not sure what's going on with the drive.

It's 500GB.
In the beginning, copying up to 300GB, the speeds are fine.
After 300GB, the speeds plummet. But at least the drive isn't locking up, yet.

I noticed this as well just browsing for files on the drive. When I look at older files they play and copy just fine. When I look at files that have been recently copied onto the drive, they're slow as hell and sometimes lock up the drive.

 

[smitbret]

Ziplock Bag+Freezer+Overnight.

It has worked for me in the past.