1TB USB HDD ALL family video on it, has bad sectors... HALP!

[AJ Dual]

I have a Hammer Storage Ext. USB 1 TB drive, which has a Hitachi OEM drive inside it.

I know I've got bad sectors, it's failing on read elements when I run diagnostics against the SMART self-test data. Problem is, we've backed up ALL our family digital video to it. I thought Mrs. Dual had just COPIED the digital video to the 1TB drive, leaving us with two copies, one on the desktop PC, and one on the 1TB drive.

She didn't tell me she MOVED it and cleaned off the desktop PC because the digital video was taking up about 90 gig and she wanted the space back.   

I know the drive's FUBAR, I'm just wondering if there's any decent freeware alternatives to Spinwrite out there?. I'm thinking I'll rip off the enclosure, mount the drive in the internal desktop's SATA chain and see if I can get that video off, try the freezer trick, whatever, in increasing levels of desperation.

[AJ Dual]

One more note...

Anyone have any experience using MHDD? 

http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/   

[Nick1911]

I'm afraid I don't have any experience with the software you've noted.  I've used the freezer trick and Norton Ghost to pull a clean image off a failing disk before.

Best of luck!

[lee n. field]

I know the drive's FUBAR, I'm just wondering if there's any decent freeware alternatives to Spinwrite out there?. I'm thinking I'll rip off the enclosure, mount the drive in the internal desktop's SATA chain and see if I can get that video off, try the freezer trick, whatever, in increasing levels of desperation.

If you know you have bad sectors, don't muck with Spinwrite.  A diagnostic won't tell you anything you don't already know.  You want to get that data elsewhere, ASAP.

I've had good luck with rdd under linux.  Copy the drive in one fell swoop to a replacement drive.  ("rdd-copy -f -T 15 -l logfile.txt /dev/<source> /dev/<destination>". Make d*** sure you know which is source and which is destination.).  At the bad sectors it will try,try,try, then write zeros to the destination and move on.  Once done you'll want to run file system repair tools (chkdsk) on the new drive.

Rdd is a forensic copy program developed at and used by the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI). Unlike most copy programs, rdd is robust with respect to read errors, which is an important property in a forensic operating environment.

If that don't work, call Ontrack.  It'll cost you pushing 2 grand.

[AJ Dual]

If you know you have bad sectors, don't muck with Spinwrite.  A diagnostic won't tell you anything you don't already know.  You want to get that data elsewhere, ASAP.

I've had good luck with rdd under linux.  Copy the drive in one fell swoop to a replacement drive.  ("rdd-copy -f -T 15 -l logfile.txt /dev/<source> /dev/<destination>". Make d*** sure you know which is source and which is destination.).  At the bad sectors it will try,try,try, then write zeros to the destination and move on.  Once done you'll want to run file system repair tools (chkdsk) on the new drive.

If that don't work, call Ontrack.  It'll cost you pushing 2 grand.

Hmm...

I've had good luck with Spinrite in the past. Granted that was back when a "big" drive was only about 250MB... It's more than a diagnostic it does attempt repair. OTOH, I know that's a dicey proposition. because if it's a head-crash, it'll just hit the bad sectors and make them worse.

I've no linux assets in the house right now. It's easy enough to format something with a downloaded distro, but none of the machines I'd be willing to do that to have SATA...

Hmm.... Linux boot disk/flash drive and another 1TB SATA drive would work. Thanks!

[lee n. field]

I've no linux assets in the house right now. It's easy enough to format something with a downloaded distro, but none of the machines I'd be willing to do that to have SATA...

Download Ubuntu, boot the live CD.  Go into the Synaptic package manager.  Open settings, repositories.  Check off "community maintained."  Reload the package information.  Then search for and install the package "rdd".

Gparted will show you which drive is which.  The command line above isn't quite right.

[AJ Dual]

Download Ubuntu, boot the live CD.  Go into the Synaptic package manager.  Open settings, repositories.  Check off "community maintained."  Reload the package information.  Then search for and install the package "rdd".

Gparted will show you which drive is which.  The command line above isn't quite right.

I was looking at that, and was messing with a RedHat Live-CD distro since that's all that rdd said it was for certain to be compatible with, and may not have the right source to compile. I guess they just haven't certified it, but it's going to work on most all.

Right now the priority has shifted to Mrs. Dual's laptop. It's HDD is dying at the exact same time as the darn external terrabyte drive was. At least that's under warranty still.

So the Terrabyte drive is going to sit until I buy a new one to copy it onto. 

[tyme]

Unplug it, put it somewhere safe.  The more it runs, the more bad sectors it might develop.  When you get a replacement, plug them both in, boot from a linux cd (sysrescuecd is good), and copy (raw) everything from the old drive to the new drive.  There are special software tools other than dd that will do this quickly while not getting hung up on bad sectors for hours.

edit: ddrescue looks reasonable.

why ddrescue is better: http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Dd_rescue#dd_rescue_and_dd_rhelp

Of course you want to make darned sure you know which disk is which, since copying from the new drive to the old would be, well, sad.

[InfidelSerf]

When you get the new drive to copy to send me a PM and I can send you a full version copy of R-Studio
It's a pretty decent data recovery software, that has saved me in the past.
http://www.data-recovery-software.net/

I highly suggest you test the new drive before trusting it to your recovered data.
I've been burned with several Seagate drives. 

Once you have everything saved (should it all work out) I'd burn a few copies to dvds
It never hurts to have multiple copies of irreplaceable data.

[lee n. field]

ddrescue looks reasonable.

Interesting.  I'll have to give that one a try, next time a failing disk comes my way.

[longeyes]

What's the old adage...?  Two is one, and one is none?  (I know that's no consolation now.  I do feel for ya.)

Given a choice between four 250 gig drives and one 1T drive I'll take the four.   You know computers are there to break our hearts.

[Nick1911]

Given a choice between four 250 gig drives and one 1T drive I'll take the four.   You know computers are there to break our hearts.

Well, so long as use RAID 5, you'd get 750 gig + data redundancy against any single drive failure.  But for the full 1tb, you'd want 5 250 gig drives.

Personally, I just stick with two 1Tb drives mirrored.

[tyme]

veloce851, that R-Studio looks interesting.  Hopefully his filesystem won't be damaged and he won't need it.

I cannot stress this enough: do NOT spend time with exotic tools trying to "repair" files on the existing drive.  get all data off as best you can, asap, using ddrescue or some similar tool that will clone the entire drive, working around bad sectors.

Then, and only then, once you have an exact copy of the broken disk on a working hdd, if any files are corrupt at that point, see if you can recover them.

Drives are so cheap, there little excuse for not using raid-1/5/6/10.  Most recent intel-based chipsets (ich8r/9r/10) have built-in raid, and on linux you don't even need that if you're using software raid.