Hdd soft failing and moving files infinite hang

[alidan]

Ok, so the last 200~gb of my hdd had bad sectors… like a crapton of bad sectors, and it more or less made my hdd stop functioning normally and even in its failure its doing it weird.

long story short, when it finds a bad sector, it should avoid it, but this thing just gives 0 shits and tries to plow through. a very fun issue to have, it makes installing any large game near impossible.

now, I have a replacement drive, and I’m transferring files, and one of the flies infinitely hung, windows recognized it was an issue, told me it was an issue, and when I told it to skip, it decided nah, ima hang. steam did this with trying to update the game so I thought it would be a great test case for the hdd and transfering, so I know what i’m in for.

so I thought, ok, screw this, lets kill it, and tried killing explorer, ok, that worked… kind of, took a while for windows to let it go, but it stopped and that’s all that matters. till windows wouldn’t open another explorer window… and I couldn’t kill the explorer that was apparently hanging, ok restart the computer.

Ok I get it, i’m going to run into this for a few games and they are all known games, because I have auto updates killed on each of them for this crap.

Now, steam when it tries to update a game that is infinitely hanging can be killed, and within about 3-5 minutes will stop its bs and that’s that, trying to make it stop trying to updating a game is a chore, but it doesn’t force a hard reset.

so my question is, anyone know any programs that won’t take my system with me if it finds a bad part of the hdd? I have total commander up and ready to go, i’m just a bit hesitant because I am probably going to have to babysit this quite a bit.

[MazeFrame]

I hope I understood you correctly. If you want to copy the files to another drive, Testdisk could work.

[Airstripone]

I get it, i’m going to run into this for a few games and they are all known games,

Why bother? Just get your critical personal data off the drive and then reinstall the games from steam. Why would you need to copy the game file if you know it is corrupt?

[alidan]

it’s a 4tb drive that is 90gb shy of full, and over its 5 years of use it did get used as a run off drive for some of it.

That along with some of the games had to be put together so a redownload isnt easy along with something along the lines of 2.5tb are steam alone.

[alidan]

The problem is the drive is failing in ways it shouldn’t be able to, so I need to watch it and when needed note what files are lost causes and do the transfer in relatively small increments, this way im not massively into a transfer, with no real idea of where its at or how to recover when it ultimately hits a part it doesn’t like.

I think what I want is a degree of separation from windows itself and the file transfer so that in the event I need to kill something, its killable and wont effectively take the system with it, I think total commander will do that for me, not 100$ though.

[MazeFrame]

Could also try a programm in windows called robocopy

I do my backups with it, but it should be able to work arround defect data.
The following command (run in CMD) will try to copy each file 3 times, in case of a failure wait 3 seconds and try again:

robocopy <source> <destination> /E /W:3 /R:3

[Airstripone]

yes use a low level data copy program. Try testcopy on a linux bootable drive, or robocopy. Whatever you do though get your really critical data off first, reduce the fullness ratio down to below 80% and the firmware might give you more access. Sometimes the controller goes funky when it can’t self correct.

For your next rig consider a pair of disks in raid 1.

[MazeFrame]

Don’t even need RAID, just regular backups.

[marelooke]

https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/

Should allow you to get the stuff that’s salvageable off. Once you have an image you can mess with the original disk with tools like TestDisk or any other recovery tool, or with a copy of the image, depending.