I am helping a friend with data recovery. The disk has increasing amounts of bad sectors and I am trying to recover what can be. I usually use R-Studio for this, a program I really like, but the person has run a chkdsk on the drive, resulting in data areas being marked as bad blocks, and data moved elsewhere. This move, however, was already too late. The sector allocation could not be done properly, because the data was already too poor to read. Thus - a ton of corrupted files. So here is my Q:
Can you undo bad blocks markings somehow, and then try and recover? I would have rather have R-studio try and re-read the bad blocks than just assume dead data, and give up on those areas. A sector-by-sector read would not solve it, as the allocation has been changed...
I'm not sure specifically about bad blocks question but programs I have used successfully in the past are Pandora and @ctive undelete.
You could also try chucking the drive into a Linux box and see if it reads the drive differently?
You're probably a bit buggered there. Data blocks of a file generally contain a pointer to the next block in the set. Chkdsk will have tried to move the actual blocks, then edited the pointer on the preceding block to point to the new location. As such, there's no way to know which the original block actually was with any certainty. Even if you could undo the bad block marking, working out which bad block was where in which file would be a complete nightmare. I guess automated tools might be able to guess by looking for blocks which contained pointers *to* the same place as the copied corrupted block, but that would require it realising a chkdsk had been attempted...
Quote from: Carr0t;278232You're probably a bit buggered there. Data blocks of a file generally contain a pointer to the next block in the set. Chkdsk will have tried to move the actual blocks, then edited the pointer on the preceding block to point to the new location. As such, there's no way to know which the original block actually was with any certainty. Even if you could undo the bad block marking, working out which bad block was where in which file would be a complete nightmare. I guess automated tools might be able to guess by looking for blocks which contained pointers *to* the same place as the copied corrupted block, but that would require it realising a chkdsk had been attempted...
After googling for two whole hours I have come to the same conclusion :sad: