Data Recovery Failing...

[yatesee]

Hello,

I'm running purchased version of ZAR 8.5.

Windows 7 x64
500GB SATA Drive, plugged in via a USB 2.0 to SATA\IDE Cable
NTFS, although in RAW format.

THe last 100 lines of logfile.txt state

Bad sector encountered @LBA 62955744 disk 0101 (but with different locations)

I desperately need to recover some of the data on this HD...

It gets to about 4/6% of the "Disk Scan: Quick - identifiying data", and then crashes asking to anonymously submit error report.

My settings are

scan whole drive (1 partition)
200ms timeout
0 retry attempts
32 skip factor
force a device\bus reset not ticked
75mb read cache

Any clues? It took 21hr 51m to get to this point, and i've let it run multiple times with varing settings, each time it takes about this lenghto fo time. (e.g. approaching a full day)

Happy to give more info if required, as some of this data will save me a lot of time and money!

Thanks in Advance,

Tom

[Alexey V. Gubin]

There are bad sectors on the drive.
Do you see multiple red dots on the "volume map" during scan?

I suggest you connect the drive directly to motherboard - the USB boxes are not good when bad sectors are involved.

Also watch the log file, the lines
"Bad sector encountered @LBA X" give you the sector numbers.
Set skip factor to 0, and see if the sector numbers are sequental like 1, 2, 3, 4. The large number (1000+) of sequenatlly bad sectors suggests the drive is not readable any longer, and probably beyond software repair.

[yatesee]

Just thought I'd better post a progress update...

I've plugged the HD directly into the MBoard, and amazing... the scan took 1 hour (as opposed to 24+), and I've managed to get the files i really really really needed. Worked first time, with no crashes etc.

So for those users reading this - Don't use USB drive convertors (I did, as I could use my desktop, so I was on my laptop), and support this software... It's great!

Thanks for your help Alexey!

Cheers,

Yatesee

[Alexey V. Gubin]

USB converters work fine when the drive itself is OK. Once the drive develops just one bad sector (as the scan would most likely hit that bad sector), the USB bridge chip would typically fail to handle the situation.