SSD/Data Recovery Tools

[king1]

What's your goto recovery software for those especially broken HDDs and SSDs?  Today's experience follows...

I had my first Samsung fail today, an 860EVO, which Macrium choked on every time, multiple bad sectors, disabled error checking in Macrium, connected via SATA, still kept failing (error 483)

CHKDSK /R was unhelpful, bad sectors, no free space on the drive to copy data messages etc

I came across this software called hddsuperclone which has a live cd here which managed to do the job quite nicely, the cloned target drive is now up and running, it noted a lot of bad sectors, couldn't really tell how many were recovered and how many were simply filled in, but on the whole I am pleased to have the system up and running without needing to reinstall everything... It Did a good job... 

from their website...

HDDSuperClone - An advanced Linux based hard drive cloning/imaging tool
Up until now, gnu ddrescue has been widely known to be the best free hard drive cloning tool for failing hard drives. It is open source and cross platform. But being cross platform has some limitations, as there are some specialized ways for Linux to send commands to a drive that have some advantages over standard techniques. So I would like to introduce HDDSuperClone, which is not open source and only works on Linux. There is a free version, and also a more advanced PRO version available for purchase.
The free version uses SCSI passthrough commands to communicate with the device. This offers more feedback than traditional communication methods, and it can be possible to detect when a drive is no longer responding properly. Ddrescue can have trouble knowing when a drive is no longer responding as the OS just reports a read error with no way to tell what is wrong.
The PRO version has the ability to use direct I/O for IDE and SATA connected drives, along with some other advanced features.
Another feature of HDDSuperClone is that it has an advanced self learning head skipping algorithm that will attempt to skip out of a bad head in about 7 bad reads. This can make getting the data from the good heads much faster. Hardware imagers can “turn off” a head and only read data from the good heads which is ideal, but that requires using special vendor specific commands.  The head skipping algorithm of HDDSuperClone is about as close as one can hope to get to that without special commands.
HDDSuperClone can import and export ddrescue map (log) files, so it you can switch between the two if needed.

The pro version is now free and open source as the software is no longer maintained as of 2022, but I cannot fault the outcome...

[nzoomed]

Could be worth a look at.
I've been using testdisk/photorec for recovery with good results.
DDrescue on linux can be at times helpful too.
I have had 2 samsung SSDs fail in the past and basically the drive did not even get detected by the system.
I've never really encountered bad blocks on any in the past, but find they just stop working in most cases.

[king1]

yep testdisk/photorec is my goto as well for files/photo recovery etc This pc would be quite a bit of work to reinstall/rebuild so I was quite pleased to get a full image/clone up and running...

I've been surprised at the few SSDs that i've had fail have to some extent been recoverable - HDsentinel shows this one with 39 bad sectors, and yet it still booted up, avg response times were 100-10000ms, so real slow, lots of not respondings, and chkdsk had multiple issues each time, behaves very much like a bad HDD in some respects

I also ran a sfc /scannow on the clone which found a few issues and repaired, also ran a dism for good measure...

[nzoomed]

Sounds like you have had better luck than me, i recently recovered successfully a whole drive for the first time that failed to read, was able to image the whole thing over with no corruption, took a few hours, it was a kingston drive.
As you say, im surprised how it can be possible to image over drive even with corrupted data and still get the system to boot.
Do the usual sfc/dism and away we go.