How to Rescue Files from Dying External Hard Drive

Ram asks:
My WD external USB self-powered 500 GB hard drive just kicked the bucket. The drive is recognized after I plug it in, but the files are inaccessible and Explorer (or any other process) that tries to access it hangs. Disk scan with HDDTune shows bad sectors across the board.

Is there any way to salvage the files? I have tried to copy through Windows Explorer and a raw copy, but like I said above, all software hangs.

Thanks!

John said:
Get a copy of spinrite from http://www.grc.com It will likely restore the drive so you can copy the files. It is an amazing product it may work at it for hours but in most cases it will restore the drive but be ready to copy the files don't be fooled that it is fixed because if it rashes again its likely gone for good. If spinrite can't fix it nothing can.

Jessica said:
Perhaps you could try an Ubuntu Live CD?

1. Just download and put the .iso file to a USB flash drive using UNetbootin (which makes it really easy but just make sure to select your USB flash drive and not your current or external hard drive) or burn the .iso file on a CD.

2. Once you've done either, now plug in the USB flash drive w/Ubuntu or the CD you burned.

3. Reboot and assuming your computer can boot from USB or CD, choose "Try Ubuntu without any changes to your computer" when you eventually get to the screen with the orange Ubuntu logo.

If your computer doesn't boot from USB or CD, which means you go straight to Windows, follow the directions here to change the boot order in your BIOS (but first, just try to note the default boot order so you can revert this later on.)

4. When you get to the desktop in Ubuntu, plug your dying 500GB hard drive in.

5. You should now see your hard drive appear on the desktop as a mounted drive. Double-click on it to see if you can access your files and copy them to another place like your USB flash drive. Hope you can!

Even if this doesn't work, you might want to change your BIOS boot order back to the default settings.

Did this help?


Artur said:

If step 5 of Jessicas' walkthrough won't help with recovering data your next best bet is byte-by-byte copy of affected disk or partition.

Make sure that you have enough free space on target drive, login as root and type in:

# download ddrescue
wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/ddres...
# extract the source code
tar xjf ddrescue-1.8.tar.bz2
# compile ddrescue
cd ddrescue-1.8
./configure && make
# first, grab most of the error-free areas in a hurry:
./ddrescue -n /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log
# then try to recover as much of the dicy areas as possible:
./ddrescue -r 1 /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log

You can write to file if that's what you desire:

./ddrescue -r 1 /dev/old_disk imagefile.hdd rescued.log

Good luck with your data recovery. Sphere: Related Content