Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

R-Linux reads disks through the host OS. You may reduce the number of re-tries to 0, but you'll get a lot of healthy sectors unread and treated as bad.

Well, Many scannings for the quick'n dirty jobs for private purpose clients are done direct on the client disk

On the wishlist for a future version we could put jump-scans like imagers in PC-3000, Deepspar and alike - Sure heads may hit a glitch several times and kill the heads - then OK it's on to clean-room.

BTW I realized that cleaning the contact spots om many WD disks with many CRCerrs may give better results. Its like their foam insulation holds an agent that makes the contact spots nasty.

IBM/Hitachi tin-contact spots at times works as cold soldering (after a lot of hot cold hot cold a.s.o, the single hole does not have the same full contact) - rubbing the spots locks the holes and the contact to the heas is much better afterwards.

Dear Marty

You are potentially killing your hdd.

Since it is insisting on bad sectors so much time.

BIOS + Operating system disk access on bad sectors, will insist with soooooo loooong timeouts, even 1 minute or 1.5 minutes

A bad drive could have 20.000 sectors

Now translate 20.000x1 or 20.000x1.5 minutes in hours and next in days.

Data recovery companies owns hardware tools to build the hdd image in hardware mode, skipping bad sectors so fast and keeping / care-ing the hdd healthiness sooooo much.

Such devices costs soo much as well

But they will image the drive even 99.999999999% allowing a full recovering against a "self-killing" process like the one you are carrying out to yourself disk.

Companies like www.RecuperoDati299euro.it will process this drive with the philosophy "charge for the needed process". Your case needs a "disk cloning with HW devices"

ALSO BEWARE THIS: newer run a disk scanning for data recovery purposes on the drive to be recovered, that process will drive the situation even worse!!

Kind regards

I've been running R-Linux, on Vista, against a 2TB disk and after 5 days 8 hours it has still only reached 86%.
Is this to be expected?
If it finds a bad/unreadable block doesn't it just skip to the next one?
Any help or guidance would be appreciated.