[NLRS] OT: Hard Drive recovery?

[Marciniak, Ed]

One thing I've observed is some drives lock up with attempts to write to them, which normally includes mounting the volumes. There are two ways around this. One is to use a special hard drive adapter that flags drive as read-only. Another is to turn off automount (xp/7/vista) and use software like R-studio tools, which can also search for certain know files types, mount virtual raid volumes missing stripe members and other neat tricks, and mount unix file systems. I've also used something called diy diskpatch in forensic mode to copy the sectors to another drive. I start with first pass, no retries and skipping 1024 or so bad sectors...to get as much good data as possible in case drive has a physical fault that is worsening like peeling media or failing bearings shedding material. I then go back and do additional passes to get most of the data around bad spots, then hammer on it to get what I can. The bad files have 'BADBLOCK' in them ascii so you can sort and delete ones of no value later or salvage high value data. Between those two tools, I've gotten around 98% of the data back the last few times.

The downside is those two tools probably cost $150 or so and it can eat a week of spare time.