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Recently my HDD started failing and I replaced it. The first thing I did was save the really important data, so that part is already covered. I am now trying to copy the bulk of the rest for the sake of convenience (just using windows explorer for now). Some files have bad sectors and just fail to copy and that's fine by me - while it will take a few min, I can find them elsewhere. My real problem is that a lot of files have sectors that take repetitive tries to copy and end up successfully copying a 10mb file in several hours. While I am grateful for the hard work rescuing that file, it is ultimately not worth it. Is there some software that I can use to only copy the files that read on the first try (which I would estimate to be the majority)?

Bogdan
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  • It's the number of retries of bad sectors that take so long. On Linux, you might use ddrescue, which has a switch to control retry attempts: https://superuser.com/questions/905811/faster-recovery-from-a-disk-with-bad-sectors . It may be easier to run this from a Linux USB, e.g. Live Ubuntu, than to change number of retry attempts in Windows. – DrMoishe Pippik Nov 20 '20 at 00:02

4 Answers4

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Generally speaking, if the sectors are bad, the copy will simply get stuck and not proceed.

It is not always possible to determine how damage might affect individual files.

If some sector damage is not too bad, it might get by some.

Even normal recovery agencies cannot recover badly damaged areas.

So get what you can, and that is about all you can do.

(I have tried this with a disk of my own and a local recovery agency and it was unsuccessful).

John
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Use the utility Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier to copy the files to another disk.

See the Unstoppable Copier 5.2 UserGuide regarding the Settings Tab for setting the mode to "Fastest Data Recovery mode".

For more information see the article Copy Files from Damaged CD DVD with Unstoppable Copier.

harrymc
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  • Thanks, this sounds like what I was looking for. I tried it and it seemed to work quite well for a while, successfully skipping a few files after only spending 10min on them, but then it got stuck on a 40mb file. It was stuck for an hour, then I told it to skip it, then it did nothing and remained stuck for another hour, then I pressed "cancel" and now it's still stuck from that. I'll probably force end it and try some of the other suggestions here in an hour – Bogdan Nov 20 '20 at 10:14
  • In the end nothing completely solved the issue, but this was the most convenient in its functionality for manually skipping files that every software gets stuck on. – Bogdan Nov 21 '20 at 21:29
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Suggest making an image first with dd or similar. This will copy the good portions... Yes, and the bad. Yet if it is a head crash or similar NAND Flash issue, you may only get one attempt, so make it count. Then mount the image or transfer it to a healthy device. At that point, you can determine what is corrupt or not and make copies.

NOTE: For a single drive, a data recovery service may not be an outrageous cost; see this Best Data Recovery Services article.

Nomen Nescio
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  • re:"or similar" - The Macrium Reflect free version has an option to skip bad sectors, can store the image to a network share or external storage, and can mount the image in explorer afterwards to facilitate copying. Decent GUI and easy to use. – Yorik Nov 19 '20 at 22:11
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You can use robocopy.
The below will copy from c:\ to x:\

robocopy c:\ x:\ /MIR /R:0 /W:0

/MIR = Mirror entire directory structure (equivalent of /E)
/R:0 = 0 retries for read/write failures
/W:0 = 0 seconds between retries
RomanK
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