Hey there,

I usually don't post, but I guess that I really need some help.

I have a WD Passport 320GB external hard, that suddenly stopped working under windows. But I won't get into details since this is a Linux forum.

Anyway, I tried to find bad sectors with HDD Regenerator (Hirens Boot) - and the disc crashes (read error). So no luck with that I tried to load the disk with various Linux bootdisks - I couldn't mount it. Just PUPPY (latest release) does show me the contents of the disk, witch leads me to my question:

When I plug the disk into the USB it's recognized. I mount it, and when I click on it it shows "Scanning..." in the status bar of the disk window. The scanning completes after 20-30 minutes. Anyway I wait, and then start to copy the files I need to another disk - Problem is, and image of 8MB for example completes transferring in about 10 minutes. Sometimes the disk just stops working (assuming when it gets to a bad sector) and the whole "Scanning" process starts again. It's very frustrating.

1) Is there any way to do it faster? I read about ddrescue for example
2) Is this really a bad sector problem if even HDD Regenerator "breaks" (witch never happend to me before)

At least - any idea how can I solve my problem and get the files (faster then 1-2 weeks of waiting). I am a photographer, and all my work is on that disk.

Hope to get an answer,
Thanks

George

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

these are your main 2 options, i would suggest if possible cloning the damaged HDD using dd and running testdisk first, otherwise take the drive to your local computer store, they usually have software to deal with such situations

Okay but how to clone it? I've read about test disk but I don't wanna mess up my hard even more.
Actually PUTTY displays "broken" files, so I know now witch ones to copy - just the scanning slows me down very much (and the transfer). The drive reminds me of a car in "safe mode" (not driving more than 15 km/h and so on

I had similar problem with one usb-external-hard-disk with very slow reading and writing on my older desktop. But it worked perfectly on a more modern desktop. Try using your hard disk on some other computer with better specs. It might work.

@rng, nope it's not pc-related. The disk won't work on any PC with Windows

have you tried breaking open the external enclosure and connecting the drive internally? IMHO doing that would remove one level of complexity in the equation and also allow you to use more diagnostic utilities.

ddrescue is a wrapper for the dd command which will retry areas where there are bad blocks, and create an image copy of the drive. I'd recommend using ddrescue instead of dd if you think there are bad blocks. A straight dd copy will probably fail.

ddrescue might as well if the blocks are truely bad and repeated attempts don't succeed. But the process won't abort before going on to copy good blocks past the position of bad blocks.

There are actually two programs called dd rescue. One package is ddrescue and the other is dd_rescue.
The ddrescue program has a manpage and an info page. The dd_rescue (in my installation) installs documentation in /usr/share/doc/packages/dd_rescue (other distro's install it in /usr/share/doc/dd_rescue).

The testdisk program mentioned earlier will try to recover lost partitions. A program called photorec will recover files where you lost the filesystem. It may not help for bad blocks, unless those blocks are used for a directory, since the problem is reading the data itself.

Another commercial program for repairing bad blocks is SpinRite. It would work best if you could connect the drive through the ATA or SATA interface, and not go through a usb interface.