AKICIDW: Fixing a cranky external hard drive

[carbonel]

I have a 3Tb external hard drive that's about half full. Unfortunately, something has gone wrong with it. When I tried to run the Windows error checking utility, it ran for quite a while, then hung.

I can see all the files, but a lot of them just return error messages or do nothing if I try to copy them. There's nothing critical if I can't recover the disk (it's mostly audiobooks and videos), but I don't have a backup.

Is there some better utility that you can recommend that will fix the drive and salvage what can be salvaged?

Comments

[sraun]

Spare sectors are 'use this space when a sector in the official reported space goes bad'. You can run out of spare sectors in a drive that's practically empty. Like Graydon said, if you see lots of drive errors, these are probably all used up and it's time to replace it.

[carbonel]

I am happy to replace it. What I'm asking about is recovering the data that's currently on it.