HDD Recovery Stuck

[MeganEnglebrecht]

I’m trying to use RecoverIt on an old PC’s HDD running Vista. Once it gets to the reading sectors part it has stopped and locked up/BSOD at 4% for the third time now on the same exact spot: Reading sectors 1355776/467208192. I first thought maybe it was due to a virus since back then I didn’t bother with protection so I knew it had to be riddled. So after finding and removing those via Malwarebytes it was still a no go. I then tried checking the disc and having windows repair and attempt recovery of bad sectors via the scanning process through Computer in windows. Nothing profound came of this and it reported successfully scanning and cleaning the drive. So I tried yet again and still no luck. Stopping at the same exact spot.

The only thing left is the boatload of windows/windows security updates racked up since the last version being installed for 2012. I wouldn’t think this could affect trying to recover a drive though or can it? Is there anything else I can try to get RecoverIt to somehow skip over those sectors or anything you can think of? Or of finding out what the problem is to maybe fix the drive to then use with RecoverIt? I would so greatly appreciate advice/suggestions on exactly where to go from here. Thank you so very much in advance for any and all help as I have no idea where to turn next with of course endless options in the world of PC issues.

 

[Jared]

Just a few suggestions.

1. If you're booting the computer on the same drive you're trying to recover data from, you're doing it the wrong way. You need to remove the drive from the computer, connect it to a different computer and scan it that way. You should never be running off the drive you're trying to recover from for many different reasons.
2. Get some better data recovery software. I'd personally recommend either R-Studio or Recovery Explorer as a first go-to option.
3. Never, ever, ever should you run chkdisk against a drive that you've lost data on. That'll often result in never being able to get the data back. You're very fortunate it didn't find anything.
4. You may have bad sectors in the drive preventing reading past that 4% area. If so, your first course of action need to be cloning the drive to another dive. Ddrescue or HDDSuperClone would be the best option for this if you don't have access to a professional imaging tool like PC-3000 or DeepSpar. Both programs run in Linux, so don't bother looking for Windows versions.
5. Make sure you have enough RAM in the computer you're working from. Data recovery programs can eat up a lot of RAM (like 16Gb for one task) so if you're running on too little it will crash.
6. When you do finally get to the point of saving files, don't even think of trying to save them back to the drive you're recovering off of.