I would like to thank everyone that responded. All the advice is valuable to me so let me address them one by one
If your data is important, do yourself a favor and pay for a professional service.
My data is important to me and to me alone in the sense that I had some long components that can no longer be found on the net or the market including a complete set of swag libraries but other than the sentimental value and the prospect of porting some of them to lazarus as a learning aid and future use they are for all intents and purposes not usable.
Hi!
There is an unimpressive tool which is the best of all.
It is just called testdisk.
Noted I have downloaded and I will evaluate it in time thank you. Fingers crossed luck will be on my side.
Sorry for the OT thread but I'm I do not have a clear head to think straight at the moment.
My external 2TB usb disk just crashed, most times windows can not recognize the partition let alone the file system or the data. a quick check show a batload of bad sectors I'm hearing its heads knocking around in the disk every time I connect it to the computer.
Any way I'm thinking on starting a rescue process using winhex or some other disk editor. Before I start a multi month journey through hell is any one aware of a good disk rescue app?
If your data is important, do yourself a favor and pay for a professional service.
I would take apart the external drive and replace the usb controller board. I met such a breakdown. The problem was exactly in the adapter board.
Good idea, never occurred to me to try and use some other kind of usb bridge hardware. The problem is that I bought the drive in August so it is still under guaranty so I'm debating if its more valuable for me to get a replacement or to get as much of the data back (data back is ahead at this time). I have a couple more crashed external usb drive I might mix and much and see what happens.
Fingers crossed.
Another suggestion: buy a NAS (RAID 1: if one of the two disks fails, your data are still accessible on the other one). Nevertheless, create regular DVD backups too, because the disk controller of a NAS can also fail...
Sadly that is my current state of mind as well. from 6 external USB drives in the last 10 years I had 100% loss of them. On the other I had no usb flash crash on me yet I still have a 128mb flash for 2000~2004 times that works with out problems (granted I haven't written on it for a long time, I access its data recently.)Hopefully a raid 1 nas will give me a better life time and chance for recovery.
If you are hearing clicks of death then most probably electronics is dying. Your best bet is to find exact same disk and salvage electronics from it and move it to your disk. That is not a job for everyone.
That's my guess to. The infuriating thing is that the disk was connected on my desktop and I never moved it or unplugged it. Well I do restart my computer once a month usually so I have no idea why it failed and as a home gamer on electronics that sounds like a fan challenge too, if I do not decide to take advantage of the warranty.
As for software that can help you with extracting your files, R-Studio is one of the good ones.
Noted, and thank you.
My personal suggestion would be HDClone from Miray Software AG (Disclaimer: I work there, but this also provides me with the necessary insight). It works on Windows and in a self-booting variant (both with a custom operating system and an embedded Linux (the later requires the Professional Edition however)). When imaging/cloning it skips over bad sectors and returns in a second run to copy as much as possible (SafeRescue, contained in Basic Edition and higher). However - to be fair - for a disk that already generates errors it might be the best to use the Professional Edition as that includes the BitImage and/or BitCopy modes. Though it could also work with the normal FullImage/FullCopy modes that are contained in lower editions (I won't suggest SmartImage/SmartCopy in this case).
Whatever you decide for, don't put the disk on too much stress. Don't boot from it (if it contains the operating system), but clone/image it from another system. Try to do a complete imaging of it (be it with HDClone or DDRescue or whatever) and then try to recover your files using that. Do not do a file based rescue as that will lead to many random accesses. A linear read is the safest bet!
I do not keep an extra 2TB disk around unused just in case of a crash so its going to be impossible for me to follow some of your advice but in all fairness I understand some of the details you are hinting and I have unplugged the drive put it in a drawer for the time being until I buy a new disk/nas to try and even then, I do not think I'll be able to have it connected in the same motherboard with an other hard disk to try to copy the partition as is, I'm more interested in software that will allow me to read sectore by sector and allow me to fill in gaps if I can eg if the partition info is not read correctly I should be able to type in the missing fields and have the software continue on the assumption that they where read from the disk. The idea is to allow me to rescue files as much of the files data can be rescued so I can replace the missing pieces if I can later on.
I'll evaluate HDclone it sounds like a good tool to have in my toolbox but in my current situation I can not rescue a complete disk.
A big Thank you to all of you for your time and advice, if I don't send the disk back for replacement I'll try to post my results.