subject: Retrieving files from bad sectors [print this page] Retrieving files from bad sectors Retrieving files from bad sectors
External storage drives might be a brilliant and convenient invention in the area of data storage. But trust me, you want to back up even the files on your storage media. While they offer a readily transportable device to store your valuable data or to be used as a destination to backup files on your computer's internal storage, this portability might just be a double edged sword. Take it from my experience, an external USB drive is no less likely to fail than an internal drive!
Perhaps bringing it around makes it susceptible to knocks and drops that could damage the device, while connecting it to multiple computers and laptops means it could pick up viruses or malware easily.
Just recently, I had the most unfortunate experience of losing my data on my external storage drive while rushing to meet a deadline. The situation was unique I could still access some files on my hard drive, while other files were not accessible at all. In my desperation, I tried commercial recovery software I found online but this didn't seem to work. The software had apparently aborted the "recovery" halfway through and left me in a lurch.
I turned to Google to try to understand the problem, in hopes of finding the source so I would stand a better chance at retrieving my files. Thankfully Google led me to the discovery that it is probably a bad sector that's causing this data loss - and my ensuing misery!
As I found out, external drives contain millions of sectors; hence, it is very normal for several of these sectors to go bad during the lifespan of a drive, or the drive could have even been manufactured with a few bad sectors. When this happens, the data in those sectors may be lost, but the data on the rest of the disk will be unaffected.
Google never fails me. In the midst of my internal mayhem, I came across Adroit Data Recovery Centre (http://www.adrc.com/software/data_recovery_tools/), which provided a free software recovery tool that helped retrieve my files. I followed the simple steps they provided and it actually works!
Here are three steps you can take when you suspect that your data loss on your external drive is due to bad sectors.
If you should experience the same issue with your external storage drive as I did, follow these steps:
1) Check your external disk for bad sectors
In such a case, check if your external USB drive really has bad sectors by downloading ADRC's free hard disk checker utility from http://www.adrc.com/software/hard_disk_checker/index.html.
Launch the software, select the drive letter of the external hard disk (for example, E:) and click on the Check' button to start the scanning. If during the scanning process, the software detects an error, it may indicate that bad sectors reside on your drive as the software has difficulty reading that particular sector. You can choose to continue scanning or stop the process. After you have confirmed that there are indeed bad sectors on the drive, the next step is to clone an image of the drive to do a scan to retrieve your files.
2) Clone an image of the drive
The image needs to be cloned because scanning for files using your original external USB drive may hang the software due to the nature that bad sectors hinders the software from reading a particular sector that is bad. Scanning an image file will be much easier which can reduce such problems from happening.
Clone an image of the drive using ADRC's free ADRC Data Recovery Tools utility. To clone the image, simply follow this link for detailed instructions: http://www.adrc.com/sm/disk_image_backup.html. After the image cloning is done, the next step is to scan the image to recover your files.
3) Recover files from the image file
Download the ADRC Data Recovery Express software to recover files from bad sectors. As the software is a shareware license, you will be able to recover a maximum of five files regardless of file size without having to purchase the programme.
Launch the software, under Working Drive' select Binary Image File'. Click on the Scan' button and you will be prompted to select the image file of the external USB drive. After the scan is completed, select the files you wish to recover and click on Recover selections'. Ensure that the recovery path' is specified to indicate where you want the recovered files to be saved.
By performing these steps, you can easily retrieve files previously inaccessible from bad sectors. While bad sectors are not actually fixable, the hard drive can be "forced" to avoid using the bad sectors with an error checking software. This will tell the disk which sectors can be written and which ones are un-writable.
