Help - Test Disk is taking forever to scan my external hard drive
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When asking for technical support:
- Search for posts on the same topic before posting a new question.
- Give clear, specific information in the title of your post.
- Include as many details as you can, MOST POSTS WILL GET ONLY ONE OR TWO ANSWERS.
- Post a follow up with a "Thank you" or "This worked!"
- When you learn something, use that knowledge to HELP ANOTHER USER LATER.
Before posting, please read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
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BitterColdSoul
- Posts: 50
- Joined: 07 Jun 2020, 20:38
- Location: France
Re: Help - Test Disk is taking forever to scan my external hard drive
Sometimes a so-called “logical bad sector”, caused by a sudden power loss during a write operation, can render a HDD inaccessible. The drive should still be fine physically, but that sector (or small group of sectors) which is in an inconsistent state has to be overwritten. I've had a situation once where someone asked me to recover data from a drive which had a similar issue, and make it usable again ; first I made a complete recovery image with ddrescue, then noticed that a single very small area couldn't be read at all, so I “surgically” overwrote that one small area with a custom made ddrescue command, and it was a success, afterwards it was working normally. But if you don't care about the data, it would be quicker to do a complete wipe / initialize / “low level format”, however you name it. If Windows fails to do it (sometimes a single inconsistent sector can make the whole system freeze), run a Linux live system on a USB drive or SD card and run a “dd” or “ddrescue” command with the drive as target and “/dev/zero” as source.