G'Day Lads and Lasses,
One of my users brought me a portable HDD that isn't working. Cutting out the sob story, they would like me to get their data back.
Device: WD Elements 2TB; NTFS; USB 2.0
One of my main bugbears with this is that the disk activity is at 100% with 0 IOPS (well almost 0, there are activity spikes, see pic). >:(
This has hampered any efforts by taking a ridiculously long time to produce a result/response
Connecting it to my PC, it takes an hour and a half to be recognised and be somewhat accessible (drive letter assigned, visible in My Computer). It takes maybe another 40 minutes(?) for the drive name and WD Icon to be displayed.
My research into the issue has shown that there is ONE bad sector, just one insensitive clod.
I have tried several things to repair the disk/get the data off.
- The latest of which is a CHKDSK /F /R /X (going for close to 48hrs)
-- it's currently on stage 4/5 with 28 of 47792 files processed, 5 were done over night. This might take a while
- Robocopy interrupted by a BSOD caused by a different faulty HDD (my boss zapped the USB enclosure with a new power brick, pulled out the HDD and used a USB conversion kit to attempt recovery... turned out to be a bad idea) ONE of the lessons here is that there are no resistors on the circuit board inside the case.
- sudo ntfsfix /dev/
- Attempted to use GParted (from Ubuntu VM) to fix it. It said use a windows machine and run chkdsk /f
- Attempted to run various Data recovery/partition tools: MiniTool Partition Wizard, Recuva... All seem to crash/become non responsive
- Attempted to use SmartDefrag portable to see if that could repair it... Crashed program
- Used Procmon to check for processes using the USB HDD, couldn't find any :(
Is there anything else that I can do to repair the disk faster?
Is there a way to stop all HDD activity except for the CHKDSK?
Any other Ideas?
nb: I don't have 1.3TB (current USB HDD usage) of space to store the content anywhere. I could go back to robocopying the data deemed most necessary by the owner to another drive (several GB, nowhere near 1TB) but that will still take a very long time.