DBDigital

Thanks for posting Cyber, you emphasis my point very clearly. In the case of very large partition/volumes it will take way way too long for chkdsk to try and repair. I would have tried to move all of the data over before trying a chkdsk, just as a precaution. I personally couldn't have waited a week and aborted the process, which chkdsk will often corrupt a disk even more if aborted before completed. Does S.M.A.R.T say anything (the tool I use currently is Crystaldiskinfo)? Perhaps not if the drive is connected via USB. 5gb of bad data means that the drive has a LOT of bad sectors. Likely more than it had spares for and you only started noticing problems when it ran out. How large was the drive? I try to keep large drives partitioned to a max of 500gb, makes it much easier to error check later. If you can't get smart data off of the drive, it may be interesting to pull it and install directly into a desktop or eSATA enclosure. Then take a look at the SMART data. But I would only try this after you have got all the data you can off of the drive. As for copying you might try fee file sync, open source and works really well for copying. It also has logging so that if you ignore the popups (which I usually do in the settings) you have a full log of what files failed to copy. And usually lists the files as still needing to be copied if they failed, but the log will give more information as to why they failed. Another option is bad block copy, it will copy a file even if there are problems. However I would use something else first to identify which ones are corrupt.

First thank you for responding. And as I said, I would be interested in AFTER I recovered the files fixing the block with a spare so it is never used again. Sure one can use "chkdsk /r but the point is, if your software already KNOWS where the problem is it would be a whole LOT less time if your software can fix it than run "chkdsk /r which may take hours and hours and hours to finish. Meanwhile the system is offline during this check. The reason I was looking at your software was to avoid all of that. To be checking my disk in the background while I work and if there is a problem, tell me where the problems is, let me recover the files (if possible or perhaps it is a cache file I don't care about) and then FIX it. All without having to shut down my system for hours and hours while a check happens. I understand that a bad block is a sign that maybe the hard drive is nearing failure. But sometimes there is just one or two bad blocks and it lasts for years without another issue. And of course it goes without saying that one should always keep good backups. But if there is a bad block many cloning programs won't function (or take a day to run). You can't do a defrag either. So again why I was looking at your software was for a program that could keep a GOOD eye on my HDs, and if there is a problem allow me to recover the affect file (or kill a corrupted file I don't care about) and FIX the block so it is no longer a issue. Then if there is any more errors, fix again then use another tool to dump the drive via cloning to a fresh disk and move on.

Can the scanner initiate a bad block swap? I know it can try to recover the file, and lets say it did. I now want to "fix" that block or swap it out so it is no longer a problem. Can the scanner do that if I wish? Or do I need something else?