Read disk failed the handle is invalid

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P Hill

Read disk failed the handle is invalid

Post by P Hill » Sun Jan 08, 2017 7:34 pm

Not sure if I aam spitting in the wind. Trying to write byte by byte a disk image....log contiinuously spits out lines that say "Read disk at position ######## failed after 1 attempts. The handle is invalid (6). It has been running for two hours like this, says 4 more hours to go.....wondering if there is any point in continuing.

History: Was using fireflox when suddenly it began opening multiple blank tabs. Couldn't get out of it without force reboot. Computer didn't boot again. Tried every restore/repair process available through Windows, booting from update USB, Sony OEM Recovery Mode, etc, boootrec, etc. Couldn't get anything but a command prompt. Directory structure was still present when I started fooling with it (according to DIR command), but got lost somewhere in the process. Gone now. Windows partition appears to contain only "recovery.txt" file which was recreated with new time each time I attempted reboot. Also Ran CHKDSK /r /f....now I know that was a mistake. NO bad sectors were found.



So I removed drive, mounted it in an external enclosure and connected it to a working machine. First ran AVG, no virus found. Next ran R-Studio scan. It showed lots and lots of stuff in the graphics and it pulled out a bunch of old doc files in raw and also a couple yellow partitions and several red. SMART shows all green on the drive, no apparent hardware problems. Didn't poke into anything further or attempt to recover, decide to stop there make an image before continuing. That brings me back to where I am now.....stuck waiting on this disk image.

Update....I just bumped the USB cord,,,,it stopped the image and spit out a message that it was unable to continue. so now I am back to square 1

Alt
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Re: Read disk failed the handle is invalid

Post by Alt » Mon Jan 09, 2017 9:28 am

My guesses:
1. Failed enclosure (USB?). Try to connect to another device, or, better, through SATA, if possible.
2. Failed disk, regardless of good SMART data.
3. Some very nasty malware .

raymonddf

Re: Read disk failed the handle is invalid

Post by raymonddf » Tue Jan 10, 2017 10:27 am

"Read disk at position ######## failed after 1 attempts. The handle is invalid (6)":

This is normal with damaged disks. Read attempts in these situations take a lot of time, skipping unreadable locations after "n attempts". Each attempt in fact is a number of attempts, decided by the OS.
You should let the operation finish; it's normal that it takes hours.
You'll end up having as good an image as possible.
Interrupting and restarting imaging may now take even longer because the disk is damaged further, as you have experienced by the disappearing dir.
It is not at all always the best to try and make an image when a disk has hardware problems.

Data-Medics
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Re: Read disk failed the handle is invalid

Post by Data-Medics » Wed Jan 25, 2017 10:44 am

It's likely that the drive has bad sectors which is why you're getting these errors. Imaging a drive like that through windows using any software (including R-Studio) is ill advised. The best option would be to use a hardware imaging tool to clone the drive such as DeepSpar Disk Imager or PC-3000. However if you don't have one of those tools you could try using ddrescue in LInux. It is much better suited to imaging a drive with bad sectors and will get a much better result. Then after you acquire a good image, go back and run R-Studio against the clone.

If you need help with ddrescue, I've posted a guide here: https://www.data-medics.com/forum/how-t ... -t133.html

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