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Modern disk drives have multiple platters and hence multiple heads.  Sometimes a single head can fail that means areas of the disk will read correctly, but other areas will either fail totally, or read extremely slowly, typically with lots of errors.  A drive head replacement may help in these circumstances, but this does require specialist hard drive repair facilities.  If a partial recovery is acceptable, or the cost of head replacement too expensive, CnW Recovery will allow imaging of the disk drive in a way that the failing head can be ignored.

The option is set up in the Configuration menu so that bad sectors when detected are skipped, but skipped with a jump.  It is worth doing some playing around with the drive to try and determine the size of data to be skipped caused by a bad head.  On one drive, a 500GB drive, there appear to be 4 heads, and the length of each track was about 192,500 sectors.  To create a disk image the program was set to skip errors in on a single failure, and then skip 12,050 sectors.  The skip value is not too important.  A small value will be slower, but a large value could lead to more good data being skipped as well.  This value can be changed at any time during the imaging process by selecting the Configure Icon.

The resulting image will not be 100% complete, but data can be recovered by software means only.