Best Blackhat Forum

This has to be told so please bear with me...

I did something really stupid - put too much stuff on a drive over time without remembering it was a used drive to start with and I just about filled it up - 100% my bad.
Then I went to use some of the stuff stored on it and got CRC errors and such.
Then - even worse I tried copying some of it to known good storage and it failed.

Most likely I could have gotten some good results by running Steve Gibson's SpinRite against it - but that would likely take the rest of my lifetime and what with running so long that drive might just fail before it got done.

Then I remembered another free tool that had been great for recovering such a disaster before:
Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier

Fortunately I have a spare PC, so I connected what I needed for new storage and boot media along with the suffering drive - after booting it up, shut down all but the most needed stuff to free resources, gave the app realtime priority after setting it for about 75% of the speed it can go for...
And let it rip.

It recovered about 98% of that drive's contents and most of what it couldn't cope with were MP4 files that can likely be replaced if I want to.

Unstoppable Copier comes in windows versions up to 8 and even has Linux versions.

And, if curious - have a look here as well:

He's made bunches of possibly useful stuff.

Excellent.

Thx for the share!

Thanks smithnowt!



That's a great resource to have!

Some folks asked me some truly great questions, and I now share the Q&A they brought about with everyone here...

They asked:

1.

Quote: How big was the drive?

640GB

2.

Quote: How long did roadkill need for the ripping process?

That is not a quick/easy answer, sadly, see below...

3.

Quote: The .exe is only a few kBs. Is that the whole utility, or does it connect somewhere and download the program?

Yes, that is the entire thing, amazing as it may sound - the box I used for most of this process had no internet connection and it did not request any either.

A more detailed answer to question #2:
When the errors popped up I had the source drive connected to my work box and had added an external drive as the destination.

It quickly became obvious that having all my normal goodies running as well as the AV scanning files on access was keeping the app badly throttled.
To speed it up would require as much of the I/O as it could get, so I moved it to a spare box.
Made sure it had as little company as possible, and once started, increased its copy speed via its own slider AND gave it realtime priority as well.

I cannot say how long it took altogether because my goal was to separate the stuff into several very reliable 160GB and 80GB drives, which I connected externally and then chose what was going where as it got done with each part - and...I was not very attentive as I had other things to do at the same time, so I just re-started it each time I noticed it had finished a portion.

Compared with the weeks and months of DL time all that info took to gather and store though - the time to rescue it was a mere pittance.

Lesson learned here:
Be more attentive to where stuff goes BEFORE it can become a disaster !!