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Quickest way to copy files from a surface-damaged HDD

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4wd:
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.-worstje (October 09, 2010, 09:07 PM)
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You turn your pagefile off if you have enough RAM that it won't cause too much of an impact -or- you use a PE, (or seperate OS), to recover your files.

I'd especially recommend at least a PE for recovering files on the system partition - you can then be reasonably sure nothing is being written to the drive you're trying to recover off, (Windows does an awful lot of housekeeping writes to your system drive).

PE = Pre-installed Environment: see BartPE or Winbuilder for probably the two most well known projects.

worstje:
Yeah, I know, but prior to checking, I did a surface check using HDTune already, and long story short, I knew there were only a blocks with issues, all of which were a bunch of files I put on there around the same period. (It was the kind of spot that is just out of reach of the 'end of drive' area, but far enough to the back you only start noticing it once your drive gets full enough.)

Had I needed to recover a lot of files, and had the time to keep my PC working its disk off to get my data, I'd have dualbooted, but I really didn't/don't have the time for all of that, and it worked well enough for my purposes.

Thanks for the tips though.

Shades:
While recovering data from my damaged HD (with Exchange server on it) to a new one I used the most recent unstoppable copier at the time (some 6 months ago).

It has a setting with which you can set the retry/repair level. Put it down to the lowest one and files with errors are practically skipped when encountered. At least it was working like that for me.

worstje:
Yeah, that's what I did. Probably shouldn't have set it all the way down, but still, I 'only' lost 500MB out of 10GB, so happy me was happy. :)

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