Davor Josipovic Just another WordPress blog – rather tryout

I had a failing hard drive with lots of RAR files with recovery records. Problem was that I couldn’t get the files off the hard drive with tools like robocopy and xcopy because the drive had many bad sectors resulting in CRC and I/O device errors. I also couldn’t repair the drive with chkdsk /R because the bad sectors kept reappearing.

I also tried Unstoppable Copier, but on best settings it seems to use 0,1% of the file size per read operation, which results in large data corruption when that read operation fails even if there are only a few bad sectors.

So I wrote a little PowerShell script which will copy the source files and replace the unreadable data with zero’s, as accurately as the partition’s cluster size allows. It will also make a XML file per file where it will store bad sector data positions for further reference. I have placed the script code on GitHub.

Note on reading bad sector data

When a hard drives fails to read a sector due to a CRC error, it doesn’t give back any data. Instead it raises an error: I/O device error. With old hard drives it was possible to issue the READ LONG command to skip the error correction part, and simply give back the data. Some programs like Spinrite use this to recover data based on re-read statistics. (If on hundred consecutive re-read operations for sector X your starting bits are “1011…”, then it is reasonably safe to assume those bits are not corrupted.) But the READ LONG command doesn’t work with modern hard drives. Modern hard drives either succeed or fail a read operation. There is no third option. What I have noticed during my own recovery is that even though the hard drive fails reading a sector the first time, there is some chance it will succeed on a retry. I have seen it succeed even after 100 fails! That’s why the -MaxRetries is so important in this script. But setting it too high will greatly slow down the recovery process in case a sector is truly unreadable.

Notes on script usage

1. First you need to download the script. Here is a link to the file. Save it as Force-Copy.ps1 to, for example, your desktop. (Make sure the extension is correct: ps1!) (There is also a more simple script available at stackoverflow.)
2. This is a PowerShell script, so it has to run under the PowerShell environment. Run PowerShell and navigate it to your desktop directory. For example, run cmd, type cd desktop and then type powershell -ExecutionPolicy bypass. (Execution policy needs to be changed because PowerShell will not allow scripts to be run by default. With bypass, the script is not blocked and there are no warnings or prompts. This is because the script is unsigned. Read more about PowerShell execution policy and signing here.)
3. Now, to see some examples of use, type Get-Help .\Force-Copy.ps1 -Examples. The most simple command to copy a file from one to an other location would be:
   .\Force-Copy.ps1 -SourceFilePath "C:\bad_file.txt" -DestinationFilePath "W:\recovered_file.txt"