daviddschool wrote:
> I had a power failure in the neighborhood and thus my one drive now
> close to death - ticking and having issues reading. I have a full
> view of the files and I have been trying desparately to COPY (using
> windows file explorer) to another drive the files that are still
> accessible - but I started to think that maybe I should use ACRONIS
> backup instead - the copying of files is taking hours even for the
> smallest ones, and I don't want the drive to die before I get all I
> can, so do you think ACRONIS would be a better way of trying then the
> method I am already using?
On the one hand, you never know how close to death the drive is. You could
turn off the power just once more on the PC, and never be able to access
the drive again. So time is of the essence.
File by file copying is likely no different, no matter what tool does it.
The tool will use the file system, to find a pointer to each file, then
read it. That requires some amount of head movement. The long time for
each file, could be caused by some sectors requiring a large number
of reads, before there is a good CRC on the readback.
A program like Microsoft Robocopy, can copy the files from one drive to
another. And it has parameters to control retries and the like.
robocopy F:\ L:\ /mir /copy:datso /dcopy:t /r:3 /w:2 /zb /np /tee /v /log:robocopy_f_to_l.log
(I think there might be a copy of version XP026 in here. Not sure.)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.11.utilityspotlight.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy
The other option, is various versions of "dd", to do a sector by sector
copy. The only advantage of that, is the copy is sequential, with
minimal head movement.
I would start, by doing a bad block scan with HDTune from HDTune.com .
If the display shows all green blocks, then the disk is relatively
undamaged. If you are seeing CRC errors, then there is damage.
http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe
Depending on the extent of the damage, you might want to investigate an
option in here.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk
If the disk was "all green blocks", you could use the port of "dd" available here.
http://www.chrysocome.net/dd
To use the Chrysocome version, it would look something like this, to copy
the entire hard drive (MBR and its partition table, all partitions), to a second,
equal or slightly larger disk. As far as I know, that "dd" has no provision
for handling errored sectors. Partition0 here, means "the whole disk". The
other numbered partitions, represent the primary partitions on the disk. I
don't know if the program has a mechanism to handle extended (logical)
partitions or not. I've never tried that.
dd --list # this gives the names of the partitions/disks
dd if=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 of=\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0
That command would copy Harddisk0 to Harddisk1. You figure out which is
which, based on size information. This utility can show you the four
primary partition entries, and you can correlate the info from the two
environments between them.
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/PTEDIT32.zip
http://www.vistax64.com/attachments...n-partiton-recovery-dell-xps-420-dell-tbl.gif
When copying individual partitions, I sometimes have permissions problems
with "dd", but I would expect the whole disk copy to work.
If the disk was showing errors, then you'd need something like "ddrescue"
which truncates the time allocated to read a sector. But that would require
booting into Linux, and perhaps by the time you do that, the disk could
be dead.
The only other advice I can give, is time is of the essence. Do whatever
you can to get the important files. I had a dying disk one day, I was tired
and decided to turn off the computer for the night. The next day, the
disk was dead, and I had no further opportunity to do anything. So I
would recommend not power cycling the computer, using USB external
enclosures as a means to adding storage capacity without shutting down
and so on.
If the bad partition is C:, then to copy it, you might have no choice but
to reboot into some other OS to make a copy. I have WinXP and Win2K dual boot
here, and if I need to copy the WinXP disk, I work on it in Win2K. The
file backup tools, could use their own non-WinXP environment to do the
copy. There is also Volume Shadow Service running on your machine, which
supports making copies of a live environment, but I don't know if it has
any limitations as to what cannot be copied or not. So copying the C:
partition can have its issues and risks (in terms of needing to reboot
over and over etc).
For rescue, I recommend at least two spare disks, one for a simple
image copy (dd), the other for any file copy attempts. You should
make sure you have enough space to store the output, before going further.
And don't try to write to the damaged disk.
Good luck,
Paul
