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Rescuing from a physically damaged HD?

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by burg1

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My relatives have Vista Premium installed, but now it won't load due to most definitely a physical error with a small part of the hard drive.
Booting would start normally but won't go beyond a certain point. The drive would make a noise and Windows would try running something to recover, but it won't help. Safe Mode and Last Known Good Configuration would behave the same.
Since it's a long travel, I would like to try and fix it in a single trip. What I hope to do is copy everything to a new drive + fix the corrupted files.
I can boot the PC from another drive. I am not very familiar with Vista's tools, but in any case I also have Partition Magic 8 (possibly Norton Ghost 10 too, if needed) and the Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test utility for the culprit hard drive. It would even probably be cheaper buying another retail utility, than driving over again?
There should be enough good space on the bad drive to fix it temporarily, marking out the bad sectors, but I wish to also replace the drive in order to avoid future issues.
My best idea is: fix the drive (mark bad sectors) with Hitachi's utility or chkdsk, then fix Vista with Startup Repair from Vista's disk, and lastly clone the HD with Partition Magic.

My difficulties:
Would the above work best?
Is Vista's Startup Repair the same as XP's repair?
I would like it to salvage as much data as possible, but especially to let me know what files from which folders got corrupted, so that I know what needs fixing ? I think Hitachi's Drive Fitness does neither. Which bad-sector/rescue utility should I use and how do I get the list of damaged files?
I'm afraid that after fixing the drive I would have no way of knowing which files (beside Vista's) were harmed, so I can't play trial and error here.
If necessary, is there any software that does all that better?

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

11 replies

by retro77

Is the computer still under warranty? If so warranty it. Is the drive still under warranty? If so warranty it. I would buy another drive and just replace it rather than mark sectors bad. Then have that warranty drive sent back to you at home. That way you get your relatives up and running in one trip.

by burg1

Thanks, I am going to replace it.
Marking the bad sectors is only so that I can clone the drive to a new one. If I try copying now, then Partition Magic would probably abort in the middle of doing so claiming that the drive is unreadable.
But first I wish to know what files were corrupted.

by retro77

Try just copying over the essentials, IE Favorites, My Documents and Desktop items. Reload on the new drive and bring back the 'user' stuff.

by ic-it

MHDD I have had good results by allowing this program scan and repair the drive. Usually you will want to set it to loop and remap. It isn't very intuitive but basically you choose the drive, press F4, use the arrow keys to scroll and the space bar to change options, F4 starts the scan after selecting the options. Set Remap to ON. Set Loop/repair to ON. Let it run through at least three times.
The program can be found from the link below or with the UBCD ISO.

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

by burg1

I found that it has a log and even tried running it on a PC, but since I have no damage, then I can't tell...

by ic-it

but it will show the bad sectors found and if possible it will recover any data within that sector and rewrite the file table. You also have an option to read any sector or file using the TOF command, but it would be better to allow the repair and then use another utility to verify the structure of files and folders. To help with your confidence, I did have a non-bootable drive that the SMART was reporting as a return to factory. I ran MHDD overnight. The SMART report was cleared and all files were intact.

by burg1

But this can't be the first drive to fail, and someone must have thought about this...

by burg1

Thanks - it does seem powerful as I could find recommendations praising how it can get data out of bad sectors (yet saying it does just that), but no information about logging or options or anything. In fact, there's very little official information besides how great it is. I've been trying searching for recovery/HDD/bad-sector software, and apparently there are so may of them that almost never run across the same one twice. And they all promise wonders but provide very little data. Then I find a review and it's all new names again, and again no data besides the fact that it deals with bad sectors.
Here's one: http://data-recovery-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

Does anyone know an application that can tell what files are not ok, even without fixing - Just check all files for integrity?

by burg1

And of course list them, not abort.

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