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I replaced a hard drive for a client, but they have a lot of family photos on the old one, so I'm trying my best to recover them. The drive powers up, but often doesn't appear in HDClone. Sometimes, however, it does appear and I'm able to follow through to the duplication process. Each and every time, the process stalls at sector 13,847,762 and the drive begins making a series of clicking noises.

The drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160GB ST3160021A.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Does this sound like something a replacement circuit board might fix or is it probably a mechanical issue?

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    It's fairly likely that there's a defect at that location, and the drive gets caught in a loop trying to recover from it. It could be the defect is on a timing track rather than the data track. You need a utility that can read and write individual sectors, to see if you can get beyond it. If so, then writing that sector might allow a copy to proceed.
    – Daniel R Hicks
    Commented Jan 16, 2012 at 1:03
  • @Mark Johnson: I was using HDClone on Windows, but PhotoRec on Linux stalls on the same sector. I'll use any OS I have to.
    – David Brown
    Commented Jan 16, 2012 at 2:39
  • Have you tried DD in linux yet?
    – Scott Chamberlain
    Commented Jan 16, 2012 at 22:03

3 Answers 3

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Most likely there are one or more bad blocks on the hard-drive. What you are hearing is the read-write head resetting its position as the drive controller attempts to pull a useable signal off the media. Each block includes error-correcting code which both detects corrupt data and, if a strong enough signal can be obtained, reconstructs the data.

Backup everything you can, cool down the drive by turning up the fans or cooling the environment, and keep trying to read the file. Often you can get the block read after many tries, at which point the firmware will re-write the data into a spare block and mark the bad one as off limits. This will need to be repeated for each bad block, so its helpful to isolate exactly which files are causing problems and work on them individually.

I wrote an article explaining this recover procedure in detail: Hard Drive Recovery

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  • Small note - not each "block", but each sector, as the filesystem deals with either blocks or clusters (Windows) that are composed of the smallest unit on the hdd level - sectors.
    – XXL
    Commented Jan 20, 2012 at 8:31
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For a commercial software that may help you out I recommend SpinRite. It's a little expensive ($89.00) but it does the job well. If you can not get any free utilities to get it to work I would try it as a last resort. It will read the sector as much as it can then mark the sector bad. When it tries the "read as much as it can" its not just doing a normal read, it actually reading the raw data off of the head and doing probability statistics to figure out what is supposed to be there. Be prepared to wait a while, it will continue to try until it has exhausted all possible ways to read the disk, I have heard people have let it run for months as it cranks away at a bad sector (and get the data back).

A lot of people knock SpinRite for recovering the data in place instead of copying the data to another drive, but you must understand that SplinRite is not for restoring data like other data recovery tools. It is a tool to allow other tools like HD Clone and DD to work.

Followup to other question in original post:

Does this sound like something a replacement circuit board might fix or is it probably a mechanical issue?

No the issue is on the drive platter itself, replacing the circuit board will not fix it. If it was the circuit board the drive would not read at all, not go to a specific sector and stop.

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Get another hard drive same size or large.

where sda is the source sdb is the destination

ddrescue -d -f -r3 /dev/sda /dev/sdb /media/PNY_usb/rescue.logfile

Additionally if you have nothing better to do but wait, or no other method works.

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=13847761
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 skip=13847763

Depending on the number of bad sectors you may have to modify the range dozens of times using skip and count together.

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