External drive corrupt

[Daz]

I have a 250gb WD passport external drive which has become corrupted. It's mostly video files on it, I can see them listed but when I play them they either hang straight away or play for 5/10 mins then hang.

I've rang HDTune on the drive and it's showing bad sectors. I've ran HDD Regenerator on it and it's supposedly fixed bad sectors but I had to stop it because after one day it was only at just over 1% of the way through.

Are there any better ways of identifying the bad sectors and targetting those directly to at least let me recover the data from the drive?

[AlexDawson]

Yes, there's a great product out there called SpinRite by security expert Steve Gibson, it's probably the single best tool for saving hard disks and data I've seen

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

[Crazybanana]

Yes, there's a great product out there called SpinRite by security expert Steve Gibson, it's probably the single best tool for saving hard disks and data I've seen

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

hmm... could be interesting to check this out. I've been using getdataback from runtime for years to recover data, and other disktools mostly from the disk providers...

Have you tested this out yourself, Alex ?

[AlexDawson]

Crazybanana, yes I have used it before, and it's saved a couple of hard disks which otherwise reported as totally dead, in fact it worked so well it made them entirely bootable again! Granted a couple of sectors had flopped entirely but it got everything back to the point where I could recover and backup my stuff

[Crazybanana]

Thanks Alex.
Sounds like an interesting app. Think I'll give it a try, as I have quite a few disks here to test it on