Question: I am looking for some help regarding a damaged external hard drive I have. I ran a chkdsk on it through the terminal and it has returned errors saying I have bad sectors ? The in-built repair tool on my Windows laptop does not repair the problem so it must be quite bad. I am just wondering if it’s possible for me to get the files off the hard drive somehow? I can see the files on the hard drive but I just can’t transfer anything as it stops about 10% of the way through.
I use “chkdsk D: /f /r” but this comes up – “The bad sectors will only be repaired if the “/r” option is specified.” Why?
Any help is appreciated
Answer:Please stop thrashing your drive with CHKDSK. CHKDSK will not repair anything, it will only make things a lot worse.
You need to clone the drive with a tool that understands how to work with bad heads/media, and then run data recovery tools against the clone. HDDSuperClone and ddrescue are regarded as two of the best DIY tools for this purpose.