Software for copying damaged partitions

[Bilal Sallakh]

Suddenly my hard disk stoped working.

It's an 80 GB Samsung HD with 6 partitions:

Partition MB starting sector
C: (NTFS) 4,000.5 63
D: (NTFS) 30,004.2 8,193,213
E: (NTFS) 10,001.4 69,641,775
F: (NTFS) 15.80 90,124,642
SWAP 502.0 123,250,680
EX2 15,664.9 124,278,840

I plugged it into a healthy Win-ME PC equipped with "FinalData" and
"Norton Disk Editor".

The BIOS recognized it perfectly.
Windows ME couldn't recognize it.
"FinalData" and "Norton Disk Editor" recognized it as a Physical
Drive.

My sensitive files are in Drive F.

When I tried with FinalData, it started counting for a while but
stoped resposing when arrieved to the damaged area in Drive F.

So I got a healthy HD, and want to the entire F partition to an
identical partition on the new HD.

I tried with "Norton Disk Editor", it worked as follows: when it finds
a readable sector it copies it, but when it finds a bad sector it
offers either to abort or to retry. I press abort and proceed, and I
think the process is okay.

But I have 2 problems with "Norton Disk Editor":
1- Can I instruct it to simply auto-ignore these bad sectors with
prompting me each time (there are more than 100000 one!);
2- In the case of ignoring bad sector, does it writes a sector of
zeros, or doesn't write any sector? which is better?

I'm planning to run final data on the new healthy image partition to
recover as many possible files as possible.

What software should I purshace to substitut for "Norton Disk Editor"
which can auto-ignore the errors?

I heard about "Norton Ghost", "PowerQuest Drive Image". Are they
helpful?

I'll be very grateful if someone can help me.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Joep]

But I have 2 problems with "Norton Disk Editor":
1- Can I instruct it to simply auto-ignore these bad sectors with
prompting me each time (there are more than 100000 one!);
2- In the case of ignoring bad sector, does it writes a sector of
zeros, or doesn't write any sector? which is better?

I'm planning to run final data on the new healthy image partition to
recover as many possible files as possible.

What software should I purshace to substitut for "Norton Disk Editor"
which can auto-ignore the errors?

I heard about "Norton Ghost", "PowerQuest Drive Image". Are they
helpful?

DiskPatch from www.diydatarecovery.nl can do that (the PRO edition). Default
the entire disk is cloned but if you happen to know the partition offset and
size, a specified range can be copied. Sectors that couldn't be read on the
source are replaced by an F6h bytes filled sector on the destination
allowing you to identify files that were affected.

 

[Arno Wagner]

Suddenly my hard disk stoped working.

It's an 80 GB Samsung HD with 6 partitions:

Partition MB starting sector
C: (NTFS) 4,000.5 63
D: (NTFS) 30,004.2 8,193,213
E: (NTFS) 10,001.4 69,641,775
F: (NTFS) 15.80 90,124,642
SWAP 502.0 123,250,680
EX2 15,664.9 124,278,840

I plugged it into a healthy Win-ME PC equipped with "FinalData" and
"Norton Disk Editor".

The BIOS recognized it perfectly.
Windows ME couldn't recognize it.
"FinalData" and "Norton Disk Editor" recognized it as a Physical
Drive.

My sensitive files are in Drive F.

When I tried with FinalData, it started counting for a while but
stoped resposing when arrieved to the damaged area in Drive F.

So I got a healthy HD, and want to the entire F partition to an
identical partition on the new HD.

I tried with "Norton Disk Editor", it worked as follows: when it finds
a readable sector it copies it, but when it finds a bad sector it
offers either to abort or to retry. I press abort and proceed, and I
think the process is okay.

But I have 2 problems with "Norton Disk Editor":
1- Can I instruct it to simply auto-ignore these bad sectors with
prompting me each time (there are more than 100000 one!);
2- In the case of ignoring bad sector, does it writes a sector of
zeros, or doesn't write any sector? which is better?

I'm planning to run final data on the new healthy image partition to
recover as many possible files as possible.

What software should I purshace to substitut for "Norton Disk Editor"
which can auto-ignore the errors?

I heard about "Norton Ghost", "PowerQuest Drive Image". Are they
helpful?

I'll be very grateful if someone can help me.

I would advise "dd_rescue" under linux. It can ignore read errors
and has the option of blanking or leavin untouched the corrseponding
target sectors. Wit the second option multiple copies to the same
target can only be better than one and never worse.

Arno