Recovery of external drive with corrupted file system and possibly sectors

phantomasko · December 15, 2013

Hey everyone

I'm really desperate for help as I've been failing to fix my drive for over a month now.

The drive itself is Western Digital 2.5" My Passport 1TB external USB 3. Drive got corrupted after my Windows stopped working as it should (couldn't shut down, reboots), and I don't know in the end if the drive corrupted Windows or vice versa.

So the full story:

At first, drive slowed down A LOT - it took ages for Windows to scan and mount it, then if i tried to open a folder it would just load and load... Files being read from it would stutter (e.g. audio files would pause and play depending on the drive).

Then after Win reinstall, drive no longer mounted without specific driver, which wasn't needed beforehand. OK. Got the driver and tried WD software for checking the drive status and here's what happened

http://www.rajce.net/f718745842

Then I let Windows try to fix it, here's outcome:

http://www.rajce.net/f718745820

http://www.rajce.net/f718745824 - here it stopped

http://www.rajce.net/f718745816

http://www.rajce.net/f718745839 - here it got unmounted (now i know why)

http://www.rajce.net/f718745834

http://www.rajce.net/f718746277

At this point I got together with a friend who has some free space for backup. We tried just plain copying the files under Win, as I can still access the disk but we ran into problems. Specifically Win could only access about 1/4 of data. This was caused by leftover security permissions on files from previous Win install (disk somehow created large number of these permissions when I was playing with one specific folder). OK so we left copy process running for at least accessible part of data and it was running fast (80MB/s or so). It gradually slowed down to something like 1.2MB/s so we stopped it.

I got home and tried running chkdsk with admin cmd access, but it couldn't finish (twice actually - once for permissions bull****, second it looped at some point). Then I tried to take ownership of all the folders and files trough cmd, but that couldn't finish either (don't remember why, it ran into an error). I'm still crossed at this part because I need to own the data to work with it under Win. I know 2 cmd commands - for taking ownership and for resetting it. With corrupted and slow drive like this it takes about half a day to set ownership.

Now options I see are:

GNU ddrescue - linux tool which could be useful, but again command line based and I would need help. This one does recovery and cloning of healthy and corrupted sectors

HDD Regenerator - maybe useful for complete fix of bad sectors, not much data retained

???

Anyone to help? Really important data here (mainly game saves and school work from past 8 years), and I don't know if I have it stored anywhere else.

Thx :]