MFT? Boot Sector?
Posted: 08 Jun 2017, 15:59
I have a failing 500 GB drive. It's not even mountable in Windows. So, I ran Testdisk under Linux. It finds the partition and I'm able to list files. I can recover for a short while then I can't continue recovering.
The disk gives error messages something like:
-boot sector can't be read (A few minutes, the boot sector is listed as good, then becomes unreadable).
-partition: read error
Here's some extra info:
There are 500 bad sectors and 2000 "weak sectors" according to Hard Disk Sentinel.
Hard drive health was 6% when Windows was able to see the drive.
Each sector has 512 bytes. So..
512 x 500 = 256000 bytes = 0.256 Megabytes
or if you include the "weak sectors"
512 x 2500 = 1280000 bytes = 1.28 Megabytes
That seems like such a small amount of data to cause so much trouble. Anyway, I try to make an image.dd file but it just stops after a few seconds and says completed with errors. There's no way 300gb-400gb of data can be complete in a few seconds. I suspect MFT or boot sector contains the bad sectors (correct me if I'm wrong). Is there some way to back up what remains of the MFT, boot sector, etc to a separate drive? Any suggestions? Thank you for any help.
The disk gives error messages something like:
-boot sector can't be read (A few minutes, the boot sector is listed as good, then becomes unreadable).
-partition: read error
Here's some extra info:
There are 500 bad sectors and 2000 "weak sectors" according to Hard Disk Sentinel.
Hard drive health was 6% when Windows was able to see the drive.
Each sector has 512 bytes. So..
512 x 500 = 256000 bytes = 0.256 Megabytes
or if you include the "weak sectors"
512 x 2500 = 1280000 bytes = 1.28 Megabytes
That seems like such a small amount of data to cause so much trouble. Anyway, I try to make an image.dd file but it just stops after a few seconds and says completed with errors. There's no way 300gb-400gb of data can be complete in a few seconds. I suspect MFT or boot sector contains the bad sectors (correct me if I'm wrong). Is there some way to back up what remains of the MFT, boot sector, etc to a separate drive? Any suggestions? Thank you for any help.