I have a Seagate drive (ST3400832AS 3.03) that failed very badly without warning

Question

I have a Seagate drive (ST3400832AS 3.03) that failed very badly without warning. Woke up to find the computer had come out of sleep during the middle of the night and rebooted. Checked the even log and it was flooded with NTFS errors. For various reasons I dont have a recent backup of this perticular data so need to do it the hard way.

I initially managed to get a few files off the disk at about 1kbps (kilo bits, not bytes) before the drive dropped off and it showed as uninitialised.

So far I've the following:

TestDisk - Detects old partition information then just hangs
Spinrite - Was an exercise in futility
HDD Regernator - Drive becomes "not ready" about about 2-3 minutes of prescan
Seatools - What a joke, all tests showed the drive as okay.

Along with a few other raw copy programs.

So far it seems that whenever the drive is taxed too hard for too long it just crashes out. Does anyone know of a peice of software that can perform a restartable raw copy of a disk drive? I don't mind if I have to restart the copy a copy of dozen times, but everything I've tried so far it's been a case of restarting from scratch each time. Not much use only getting the first few GB of data over and over. So something slow, persistant and with a resume function would be of great help.

On a side note, this was a secondary internal drive, not an external.

Explanation / Answer

I had good luck with Unstoppable Copy. I was able to get many files from a hard drive with many bad sectors when an ordinary Windows or DOS copy was giving me CRC errors. Most of the files were usable, even those that Windows was failing to copy; I only lost a few photos that had too much data gone.

Spinrite may actually be more effective at fixing data, but I started to recover a 80 GB drive with it, did the math after two hours and calculated that it would have to run for about a month and a half to complete the drive. I did not like this because usually with a bad hard drive, you want to get the stuff off quick, before it gets worse.

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