Hard drive I/O error and not scanning

[Dymond]

Hello,

I few weeks back I plugged in my external HDD and got an I/O device error and could not access the drive (a WD Elements 1tb drive)

I looked around these forums as well as other sites and found recommendations for using chkdsk to scan and repair the drive, testdisk and getdataback; the latter completely stalled and failed to respond when scanning and the former (testdisk) is still in the process of scanning after 4-5 weeks of constant running and only at 67% - at this rate it will take more than a year to finish scanning but also provides the following during the scan:

Has anyone got an idea what else I can do? Im thinking my only option may be to wipe it and try to recover the data with something like EASEUS data recovery?

Thanks in advance, Jon.

 

[carnageX]

Well it seems like there's a lot of damaged / bad sectors on the drive, which are irrecoverable.

What I would try doing is booting off of a Linux LiveCD (such as Ubuntu) and see if it can read the drive at all. If it can, start copying over data (you may have to do it in "pieces" to copy "around" the bad sectors....so you may not get all of your data back).

After you get your data backed up (if you can), then I would look into Spinrite if you want to actually try and make the drive usable or if you couldn't back the data up from a LiveCD. However, if there's still a warranty on the drive, you may want to just send it in - just note that they won't attempt to recovery your data, however. Professional data recovery costs around $500 - $800 or so.

 

[Dymond]

Hey, thanks for the suggestion, I'll give the LiveCD option a try - might not get a chance for a while due to workload but will post the result when I do!

I guess thats my last option..

 

[carnageX]

Good luck, let us know if it works out or not.