[SOLVED] Another couple questions about bad hard drive recovery

[Haole Boy]

Aloha. Had a customer machine come in and I eventually discovered that SMART indicated 40+ reallocated sectors. Ordered a new drive and imaged the bad one using ddrescue. Between ddrescue and HDDRegen was able to create an image with only one error reported by ddrescue.

Questions:

1) Is there a way to tell what is/was in that bad sector? i.e. if it was free space, then I don't care too much that I could not recover it. But, if it was not free space, then I'm a little more concerned about the system health once I restore the image to a new drive

2) After getting the image restored, boot failed. I decided to run "sfc /scannow" and "chkdisk c: /f" from a PE disk. sfc finished without an error, but chkdsk showed 56 KB in bad sectors

Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems.
No further action is required.

966961151 KB total disk space.
78699060 KB in 434804 files.
245896 KB in 38091 indexes.
56 KB in bad sectors.
638507 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
887377632 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
241740287 total allocation units on disk.
221844408 allocation units available on disk.

Strange to see this on a brand new drive (Western Digital Black 1TB). Is this related to the bad sector I could not image? Also, I checked SMART after this and it was clean. I'm now running chkdisk c: /r to see what it finds.

2) diskpart detail disk shows the following partitions. Is it a good idea to assign each partition a drive letter and run chkdsk on it?

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- -------
Volume 1 C Partition 922 GB Healthy
Volume 2 ESP FAT32 Partition 500 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 3 WINRETOOLS NTFS Partition 490 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 4 NTFS Partition 450 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 5 PBR Image NTFS Partition 7961 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 8 DIAGS FAT32 Partition 40 MB Healthy Hidden

Mahalo!

Harry Z.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Run WDdiag on the new disk. Sounds like a bad drive.

 

[kwest]

Why on earth would you image a bad drive over to a new drive.

Fresh install
Recover data
Transfer data
Setup for user

 

[labtech]

HDDRegen

Would suggest to never use again.

1) Is there a way to tell what is/was in that bad sector?

Not with any ordinary tools. Need advanced firmware tools, starting in the $5000 range. For sectors that have already been reallocated, not much can be done.

2) After getting the image restored

Was the image restored back to the originally failed drive?

 

[lcoughey]

I agree with @labtech and would also suggest to never run chkdsk either (unless data is 100% backed up and I assume you did this against the copy). The bad sectors it found are likely MFT records that are now lost and, as a result, any file or folder path within those records are now lost.

There is no telling what data was lost in any sectors that HDDRegen forced to remap (or "repair" as it likes to say).

 

[Haole Boy]

Run WDdiag on the new disk. Sounds like a bad drive.

Ran WD Data lifeguard diagnostic. Drive got a "passed" rating - no errors.

Why on earth would you image a bad drive over to a new drive.

Fresh install
Recover data
Transfer data
Setup for user

Because if I can recover 99% of the old drive, then it is cheaper for the customer as opposed to a fresh install. The first 3 steps are easy, but the "setup for user" is a time consuming process. The customer never has installation media and/or license keys so a lot of time (i.e. the customer's money) is spent tracking this stuff down.

Would suggest to never use again.

Not with any ordinary tools. Need advanced firmware tools, starting in the $5000 range. For sectors that have already been reallocated, not much can be done.

Was the image restored back to the originally failed drive?

OK. Thanx for the info. Image was restored to new drive (i may not know a lot about failing hard drives, but I do know to only use the failing drive to create a backup / image and nothing else!

I agree with @labtech and would also suggest to never run chkdsk either (unless data is 100% backed up and I assume you did this against the copy). The bad sectors it found are likely MFT records that are now lost and, as a result, any file or folder path within those records are now lost.

There is no telling what data was lost in any sectors that HDDRegen forced to remap (or "repair" as it likes to say).

Yes, the chkdisk was run against the restored image on the new hard drive. But... I ran HDDRegen before creating the image since there were bad blocks. I did not know that it would remap sectors. However, I did create a backup of the disk using Drive Snapshot before I started working on the machine and discovered the hard drive problems and subsequent HDDRegen and ddrescue imaging. Given what you've said about possible MFT issues I think I will restore that backup and start over.

Thank you all for your input. This is why I ask these questions and I really appreciate the sharing of knowledge here on Technibble.

Harry Z

 

[Diggs]

Would suggest to never use again.

@Haole Boy don't worry too much about the HDD Regen. Many of us run it AFTER sector copying a problem drive. It does clean things up nicely for cloning or future work and after several hundred uses I have never had it disappoint. (But - It will severely interfere with data recovery if you decide to send the drive out.) Many/most(?) times I run it just to get a sector-by-sector analysis of a drive on delay and sector failures. It uncovers many things that SMART never sees.

 

[Haole Boy]

Update: I used Drive Snapshot to restore my original backup (before I did anything to the drive) to the new hard drive. The 56 KB in bad blocks no longer appears. Ran chkdsk on c: after doing this (was booted to a WinPE image) and it "made some corrections to the file system". From that point I was able to proceed with repairing what I originally started out to do and the machine has been returned to the customer.

So, what did I learn from this situation? I need to always create a full disk image instead of a backup just in case there are hard drive problems that I did not know about. In this case I got lucky that my original backup was successful and I was able to use it to restore to the new drive.

Also learned to not run HDDRegen until after I have imaged the drive.

Again, mahalo nui loa for all the assistance and advice.

Harry Z

 

[Joep]

1) Is there a way to tell what is/was in that bad sector? i.e. if it was free space, then I don't care too much that I could not recover it. But, if it was not free space, then I'm a little more concerned about the system health once I restore the image to a new drive

If you mean what file it was allocated to, then yes. You can use a MS tool called NFI.exe (NTFS only btw), or the easier option is probably HD Sentinel. I did a little write up about it a while ago: http://www.disktuna.com/finding-out-which-file-is-affected-by-a-bad-sector/.