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Bad Sector Repair Tool

the_Grinch

Can anyone recommend a good bad sector hard drive repair tool? Free is preferable, but anything with a full trial will work. Thanks!

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Comments

dustinmurphy

I would say... a new hard drive.

Most modern hard drives have built-in protection for bad sectors... once that is used up... the sectors go bad, and there's usually no (cheap) way of recovering the drive.

If you're looking to get data off of the drive, you can try a service like Data Doctors... if you want to recover the sectors to re-use the drive, I wouldn't recommend it.

Krusty_47

GRC | Hard drive data recovery software

Steve Gibson of Twit.tv's security now show wrote the piece of software that does a pretty good job...However it can take a while.

DevilWAH

Krusty_47 wrote: »

GRC*|*Hard drive data recovery software**

Steve Gibson of Twit.tv's security now show wrote the piece of software that does a pretty good job...However it can take a while.

When you say a while you are right. I have used spinrite to recover a 120gig drive. Took about 5days solid running and recovered about 95% of the data. its a cleaver and low level tool that can reconstruct data from a drive. Very powerfull and part of my toolbox

Shanman

I have to agree. SpinRite is an amazing low level tool and is part of my toolbox as well.

the_Grinch

We are running into an issue setting up drive encryption with truecrypt due to bad sectors on the driver. It is operating properly and I assume it will die at some point, but no need to recover anything off of it at this point. Thanks guys!

dustinmurphy

the_Grinch wrote: »

We are running into an issue setting up drive encryption with truecrypt due to bad sectors on the driver. It is operating properly and I assume it will die at some point, but no need to recover anything off of it at this point. Thanks guys!

For the price... I would just go buy a cheap drive.... if the sectors are so bad that the hard drive can't recover from it... you're going to lose more sectors and have more problems. For $80-100.. you can get a decent little 500G drive.

RobertKaucher

I have to put my two cents worth on SpinRight. It is totally worth the money.

whatthehell

Second vote for SpinRight!

veritas_libertas

It's a good prevention tool for sure. Just be warned that if the drive is near death than it could kill it. Also, in my experience with encryption (I'm an Admin for a Whole Drive solution) it's best to just replace the drive if it has issues like that. It gets really nasty if the drive is near death.

DevilWAH

the_Grinch wrote: »

We are running into an issue setting up drive encryption with truecrypt due to bad sectors on the driver. It is operating properly and I assume it will die at some point, but no need to recover anything off of it at this point. Thanks guys!

Do remember that if an encrypted drive fails it is far harder to recover than an unencrypted drive. a few bad sectors can make a whole block of data unrecoverable. When drives fail they often have a few bad sectors appear over a time span and then sudnley drop of the edge in a a messy puddle of hell. Once a drive starts to show bad sectors that's it, you may repair them but the drive is on its way out. All a recovery tool such as sprin right will do is (possible) recover the data, it will not fix the drive. If you are seeing enough errors to cause issues installing drive encryption then don't! install it, unless you are willing to risk all your data.

ChooseLife

SpinRite +=

cmitchell_00

We tried the free/trial version and one of the owners read that this product was highly recommended so he purchased the product for the company. By which I have used SpinRite in the past and it's ok but, I'm not an fan. It took an very long time to get results which includes running maybe 2-3 times or more. The process takes roughly 24-32 hours and if it fails and you have to rerun you have to factor in another 24-48 hours. I always noticed the second time around on the bad drive it would take longer. I guess nothing is 100% so; you have some decent products out there to try and add to the toolbox.