Recovery from a drive with many bad sectors
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CnW Recovery software will recover from disks that do have a high number of bad, or failed sectors.  The best way to proceed is to create an image file, probably in stages.


The following stages should be followed.


The disk image should be started, and if possible the complete disk imaged. 


At various points the imaging may stop, but if it stops for more than 5 or 10 minutes, it is probably preferable to start skipping sectors.  This can be done using the Configure/ Hardware configure options, and probably set the drive up so that if 10 read errors occur, then skip 100 sectors.  This will allow skipping in sections. If the system keeps pausing for long periods, try increasing the skip value, to maybe 1000, or 10,000 sectors. If this keeps hanging, cancel and try the next procedure.



The directory image should be constructed


To construct the directory image it is necessary for the disk image to have enough information to determine the basic disk structure.  For all disks this normally means a valid sector 0, (Boot sector), or one created by the Partition section of CnW. It is also necessary to have a the start of the partition imaged, and the start of the directory or catalog.  The following values are only typical values for single partition systems, but are often correct


NTFS disk - partition start, sector 63  (0x3f).

MFT start,  6,291,519  (0x60003f)


MAC HFS+ - volume start  262,208  (0x40040)


If the above sectors are part of the image file then when Recover is selected, there is a button on the screen for View MFT or View Cat.  When selected, it will display the location of all directory starts and lengths.



At this point, the failed hard drive should be selected, and the function 'Add runs to disk image' will now access the hard drive and update the disk image file.


After this stage there will be a disk image with the basic sectors required to navigate the files on the disk.




Final stage


If a recovery is required, it will now be possible to do a 'dummy' recovery using the image file.