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External hard drive Photorec recovery stuck

Posted: 15 Apr 2015, 20:24
by me1t0
I have a 750GB Western Digital external hard drive ((wdbabm7500abk-00) with a USB 2.0 cord. I believe its speed has been very slow ever since I first plugged it. (After I click on the drive, it took nearly 2 minutes for the format message to appear) I think there's two partitions or whatever, one which is the bulk of the hard drive's storage, and the other one storing the hard drive's SmartWare, recognized as a CD drive. One time I transferred my files into the big partition. I was frustrated by the speed I plugged and unplugged the cord and then accessing the big partition says that I need to format it. Or the drive could have been dropped to the floor one time.

I looked across the internet and discovered TestDisk and PhotoRec. I tried TestDisk for a while, but I canceled its process and moved to PhotoRec. When I run PhotoRec, several hours has passed and I recovered over 800 of my files. The recovery process halted to a standstill and even about half a day later, nothing else was retrieved. The reading sector field remained at around 6200000/1463773184.

I am using 7.0 WIP, and Windows 7 64 Bit.

Re: External hard drive Photorec recovery stuck

Posted: 16 Apr 2015, 08:06
by cgrenier
Clone the disk using gnu ddrescue to a new empty disk.
Here an old example: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk