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I've been using dd/ddrescue to clone a hard drive with several bad sectors. Some sectors were definitely unrecoverable, but I'm wondering if there's any way to tell which files might have been tied to/spanned across those sectors (via the destination drive, if possible).

I was also unable to recover anything beyond 25GB on that partition, which was 50GB in total, and I'm pretty sure it was nearly full. Is there any way to tell which files might have spanned or been fragmented beyond that 25GB?

FYI, the partition was an HFS+ formatted Mac drive, but I have access to Ubuntu, OSX and Windows, and can thus use any utility of any OS.

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Have a look at Spin Rite, as it may be able to recover data on your HDD which is unrecoverable by other software.

Spin Rite has a very good reputation.

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  • I have heard a lot of good things about Spin Rite, but some of it sounds too good to be true. For instance, I've heard a lot about how it can "repair" bad sectors and stuff, but it couldn't possibly do that, could it? I think it would merely remap them, but if it can't read them, it wouldn't be able to remap them, would it? And what about drives that have reached their remapping limit? Just a thought...
    – purefusion
    Commented Jan 31, 2011 at 16:04
  • @purefusion: Modern hard drives have several knobs that can be turned to increase the chances of recovering data. Operating systems generally set these knobs to "moderate", since they don't want to stall out for more than a few seconds while trying to read a random sector. (These knobs are different per-manufacturer and per-firmware build as well... and OS devs don't want to track it all.) Dedicated disk recovery software knows it's intended to get data back, and will usually do things like "Completely disable power-save features", "pull out all the stops on recovery", etc.
    – user11934
    Commented Jan 11, 2013 at 19:45
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This question is rather old, but someone with a similar issue might be interested.

The ddr_utility tool set contains several tools designed to improve the quality of a data recovery made with ddrescue. It includes two tools which have the specific purpose of locating the files affected by unreadable sectors : ddru_ntfsfindbad and ddru_findbad. I've tried the first, and it worked very well, generating a detailed list of the corrupted files with the size of corrupted data for each one (it allowed me to repair many of them, which happened to be duplicated, sometimes two or three instances of the same file were corrupted but at different spots, so by combining the good parts I could regenerate 100% of the original file). But it only works for NTFS partitions obviously, and requires that the system files, most notably the MFT (generally located within the first 5GB of the partition), have been fully recovered. For a Macintosh partition, the second tool may provide the desired result, although it's said in the provided manual that it's generally less efficient than the NTFS-specific tool. Otherwise, one would have to generate a list of bad sectors from the logfile, and find a way to identify the files corresponding to those sectors on that type of partition, I have no idea how.

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