Hard disk with bad sectors has lost files

Hi everyone

I have a 60gb internal hard drive that had some bad sectors but i have used it for years, for several months it was unplugged from my pc, when i decided to use it again and plugged it to my pc unfortunately i found out that most of my files are lost. I can't see most files and folders that were there.

I tried several file and format recovery softs, they succeeded to find them all but i thoght that it may be a risk to recover them by this method. I thought it sould damage some files.

I remember some times ago i was in the same situation with another hard drive and i did a checkdisk and everything came back but unfortunately checkdisk didn't help this time.

Please help me to resolve the problem with the best method.

Thanks in advance.

Hi henrikkhach,

I can only redirect you to this thread Best method/tool for cloning a failing HDD for Data Recovery? I had only made some preliminary experiments then and have forgotten all about it. :) I can't lead you by hand as in Partition Wizard, PhotoRec and TestDisk which we have used frequently here.

However, based on that thread atleast three users had used ddrescue in System Rescue CD successfully. Their threads are also listed in that discussion and you may go through those.

I think the current version of System Rescue CD contains ddrescue version 1.2 and you should use the term mapfile instead of logfile. Google ddrescue and read about it also. If other users could understand and do it you can also do it.

The other point you should keep in mind is your destination drive on which you are going to clone your drive should be distinctly larger than 60GB, say 120GB or 250GB so that you can identify the source Disk and destination disk by their capacity. The destination drive should be an empty drive.

The amount of data that can be recovered will depend upon how good your bad sectors are and so nothing could be assured. You should be happy with whatever you get.

So experiment.

Not to get confused with the mapfile/logfile issue, you may download SystemRescueCD-x86 version 4.2.0 (the same version I had used in my experiments in those days) from Sysresccd-versions - SystemRescueCd

Hi Jumanji

Thanks for your reply, surely i'll do your advices.