I got a 1 TB Samsung F2 from a friend who dropped the hdd on the floor while in use in an external case which apparently caused a head crash. Now he wants me to recover the data that was on it.
Due to lack of a free 1TB hdd we want to recover the data partially onto DVDs and flash drives.

The drive registers fine in UEFI, but not in Windows (drive manager says drive needs to be initialized) and S.M.A.R.T. data shows bad reallocated sector count. I can access it using drive diagnostic programs that have their own file handlers (that don't rely on Windows).
So I ran a scan in R-Studio NTFS to find the files because apparently the file system on the drive is damaged. However when trying to read a bad sector the scanning slows down to a crawl. I've let it run for 2.5 days now and it has scanned about 5% of the sectors. That means the full scan would take almost 2 months...

Does anyone know a recovery program that can quickly skip bad sectors and then save the found files to disk or dvd?

Now I know about programs like Testdisk which can repair the MBR so the drive is accessible in Windows again which would eliminate the need for a dedicated recovery program. However that's a method that involves writing on the disk which may make things even worse, so I'll save this as a last ditch attempt. So please only recommend programs that can recover the data using read operations only.

5% to scan means it won't ever really 'complete', or if it does it'll be lying and full of errors (similar things happen when you 'download' files and the rate drops below 1kb/s: anything you get will be full of errors).

IMO you'd be better off taking it to a data recovery place.

Well there are a lot of errors on the disk but relative the massive size of modern hdds this is nothing. My estimate from the log would be 500 error messages (= unreadable sectors) out of 100 million read. So we can expect many files to be affected, but most of them should still contain mostly good data. Certainly worth a try since unlike you, I don't expect professional data recovery software to "lie". And yes the program still made progress (found new bad sectors every few minutes), until it tried to save a log which crashed it.

Of course it's "better" to let others do the dirty work. Did you just volunteer a paypal donation to make it happen?

Again, what I need is a recommendation for a Windows based data recovery program that can scan even damaged drives fairly quickly (lets say under 2 days) and does not rely on Windows to handle drives.

I'm not saying the software is deliberately lying, just that when things are taking a very long long time to happen, my experience has always been that it ends up being a waste of time waiting for it because it won't work in the end anyway. I used low download rates as an example, but I'd had similar experiences with copying files that were going at very slow rates for various reasons, as well as HD check tools trying to work out what's wrong with dead hard drives.

Also "professional data recovery software" == pay money for it.

What you're asking for here is almost an oxymoron in terms. In fact I'd be surprised if Windows 7 would let you have access to hard drive contents other than through it's own systems - lets it protect against malware then.

Have you tried Bart PE?

Yes, you have to pay for r-studio.

Maybe I worded it badly, but r-studio does what I want (just too slow): The drive doesn't show in "My Computer" but r-studio detects the hard drive and can scan it. As far as I can tell Windows can't read the file system anymore (MBR damaged) but can access the drive itself just fine. However there's recover software (e.g. recuva) that can only scan drives that are shown in "My Computer" which is useless for me (at least for now).

Will try Bart PE now.
EDIT:
I think it's not what I'm looking for. My computer works fine so I don't need an independent Windows environment.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 13 2012, 11:57 am by NudeRaider.

Bart PE is like a linux live CD, you boot it up and it's a stripped down version of windows that comes with lots of different diagnostic tools and programs, including HD recovery things. It might have tools that come with it that can read the disk, for example.

I'd be very careful downloading it from torrent sites, though. I have an old (5+ years) version I acquired through friends that works fine. When I tried to download a newer version, it had viruses in it.

Really SEN? Nobody ever did file recovery in some form? Or is it just I have too high requirements?

@Lanth And those tools are not separately available? It seems pretty complicated to have to create a live CD just to run a tool that works under my normal Windows anyways.

Sorry nude, I'm so inactive

My WDC Green had bad sectors. I used roadkil's unstoppable copier to get everything off, as well as multiple passes of checkdisk (though none of them finished).

Partedmagic on Hiren's Boot CD lets you run gparted, which is capable of repairing the bad sectors by partitioning them out of the HDD, and replacing them with extra sectors (that are reserved for this purpose). I didn't get to do that because my drive is still under warranty, and there was no reason to try to "fix it".

Probably you can get them separately. But I don't - I just use BartPE because it has everything I (have) need(ed) all in one easy package. Also the reason I suggested BartPE is that isn't 'true' windows, rather a stripped down version. So it might have solved your "not windows" problem.