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Quickest way to copy files from a surface-damaged HDD

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MerleOne:
Just a quick update : the HDD is now quite dead, it won't be recognized by Windows any longer.  I guess that was to be expected, unstoppable copy being quite intensive.

Fortunately, I have a snapshot image, but that can be exploited only when restored onto a safe HDD, so I can run recovery tools from this restored HDD.

At that point I remembered what I should have done, or at least tried.  I mentioned I had tried Active@FileRecovery Pro.  There is a companion program, Active@Partition Recovery.  It can also make images that can later be processed with these powerful recovery tools.  Now I just hope the snapshot image will give the same result...

MerleOne:
Yet another update : I have almost completely solved my recovery problem, except for a small detail : the created drive snapshot image was not easy to use : only one folder appeared in the mounted virtual drive, and it was empty.

I tried Recuva from Pirifom, scanned the virtual drive in deep scan mode, asking to see only non deleted files, and I was able to recover all files.

The small detail is that some of these recovered files are corrupt, those who contained damaged sectors that were skipped during the imaging by snapshot.  And there is no easy way to tell which are OK and which are damaged, only by opening them in their respective applications. And even then, it may not show right away.

Anyway, that's better than nothing !

Thanks for your suggestions.

f0dder:
Recuva is only really suitable for recovering recently-deleted files - it's not very good for "deep" recovery purposes.

The tool I've had best success with is GetDataBack from runtime systems. It's slow as hell and is non-free, but it does a pretty decent job... of course won't "repair the unrepairable", but handles trashed filesystems decently.

MerleOne:
Are you sure it can handle virtual drives?  I tried many tools such as active@filerecoverypro, Easeus Data Recovery, PowerDataRecovery, and they all want a "real" HDD to work on.  In that case, files were not really deleted, the filesystem was just slightly damaged.

worstje:
I happened to find out my system drive has bad sectors today, and as one might imagine I'm going on a mad backup spree. Some files got damaged sectors in them, and it really isn't fun to have to deal with that stuff.

After googling for a suitable rescue tool, Unstoppable Copier did an awesome job saving my stuff. It also lets you say that you want it to only try a little bit to copy certain files, which is great for me since the file that was borked was a huge 10GB file for me, and the damaged parts I can luckily restore through other means. Sadly, since it was my system drive with my pagefile on it, it had a habit of freezing up my entire PC while trying to fix broken sectors, but I think that is technically unavoidable.

I definitely recommend that program to people who need to save files from their damaged disk drives.

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