Damaged external HDD - how can I rescue the data?

[Modinstaller]

Hey everyone,

 

I have this external HDD which was dropped several times and stopped working. By the looks of it, it's good for the trash bin. At this point I'm only trying to save the data that's on it.

My knowledge in the field is lacking, I'm backing up some files right now but it's very inefficient and time-consuming so I'd like to know if there's any better way of doing it.

 

About the state of the drive:

It kinda works but very slowly. Parts of the disc are damaged since some files will read fine but others won't (and will freeze windows explorer and teracopy in an infinite loop). The drive sometimes disconnects, especially when trying to read some very bad files and looping for a long time.

It's very slow to show its files, copying takes a very long time. Some files are instant to copy, others take some time, others freeze.

Interestingly, for about 20 seconds after I plug it in, it works at a normal speed, though there's still the issue with files that are damaged beyond recovery and freeze the drive.

 

About the backing up:

I can't just copy entire folders and wait. The problem is, when the drive gets to a bad file, it'll freeze and at some point eventually disconnect. I don't know how to tell the drive, or teracopy or whatever, to skip bad files and continue copying everything that's readable.

Hence if I have a folder with a thousand files in it and the 10th one is bad, I'm only going to copy 9 files out of potentially hundreds readable ones. Because of this, I've taken to manually going into sub-folders and copying sometimes file by file, plugging the drive out and in when I encounter a bad one and logging which one it is for reference.

On top of this, since the drive is really only efficient for a couple seconds after plugging it in, I've taken to plugging it in and out repeatedly and copying stuff very fast.

As you can imagine, this is insanely time-consuming. I just got to a folder with 155 files in it. I really need a better solution.

 

I'd like to know if there is any specialized tool that could parse through the entire drive, backing up files and folders, skipping the ones that take too long.

Or any other way of backing up the drive's data without too much human interaction - something that could save me hours of pain.

 

I haven't tried any of the regular tools (clonezilla etc..) because I figure when they get to a bad sector, the disk will act up, freeze or disconnect, and the program will miserably fail like all the scans I've used so far (including chkdsk). Are there any worth trying anyway?

 

Thanks for your time!

[An0maly_76]

I doubt you'll get very far with this with physical platter damage. Save what you can, that's all you can do.

[DonDroid]

Basically, you need to figure how important the data is for you personally, and if it's worth the very time-consuming process. Maybe prioritize the most important stuff and leave the rest.

 

I used Download Recuva | Recover deleted files, free! (ccleaner.com) for my damaged External HDD but i it was just out of curiosity because the data wasnt that important to me and it was a different problem because my HDD basically lost its MFT.
Also, from my experience at least Recuva and i guess Similar programs want to scan the full drive and if the performance drops after 20 seconds that's bad.

Just out of interest what amount of data are we talking?

 

And if it's really important to you you could also try your luck with a professional recovery service. Not that I have experience with it, but I heard of quite a lot cases where they were able to restore a lot of the lost data of damaged drives. Just an idea

Edited September 5, 2022 by DonDroid

[Alex Atkin UK]

11 minutes ago, DonDroid said:

And if it's really important to you you could also try your luck with a professional recovery service. Not that I have experience with it, but I heard of quite a lot cases where they were able to restore a lot of the lost data of damaged drives. Just an idea

Plus the more you try to do it yourself, with it being physical damage, the higher the chance of a professional not being able to recover it.

 

That said, taking it out of the external case and connecting it directly to SATA (assuming its not one of the annoying ones which don't have SATA internally) of your PC is generally the best bet.  USB controllers at the best of times can be finicky things, PCIe SATA is more likely to recover after a stall, though its still going to be very very slow and ideally you'd just try to clone the drive to another one first.

[Modinstaller]

Sadly the USB-3 is soldered.

 

The data is mostly audio, video and image files, about 150GB of them, thanksfully the drive wasn't too filled yet.

 

I ended up taking the time and doing it the painful way. I managed to get almost all the recoverable files out of it, except a couple which are located in folders that freeze windows explorer when I try to see inside. Since I can't see inside, I can't copy the files even though I know some of them are good. Copying the folder just freezes at the first bad file, hence any good file after that is hard to reach for me.