I'm trying to recover some data off a crashed hard drive using Windows System Recovery. Startup Repair just hangs for days (yes, literally) with no disk activity. So, I'm trying to run chkdsk c: /f from the command line. It seems to work, fixes errors, etc, but then hangs after I see the message:
chkdsk is verifying usn journal
All I get after this message is a blinking cursor. So after a few hours with no other response (even to ctrl+c, I hard reset my computer and try again.
I was given a tip that I should delete my usn journal. So, I tried running fsutil usn deletejournal /d c:, but it couldn't find fsutil.exe. So I copied fsutil.exe to a thumb drive and tried with that, and this time got the message:
The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable
So, now I'm running chkdsk again, and it's still finding errors, but far fewer than the first time around. It seems to be stuck at "chkdsk is verifying usn journal" again, but I'll let it sit for a couple hours.
So my question is… What should I try next?
- Keep running chkdsk until it works?
- Keep trying to delete the usn journal after each attempt to run chkdsk?
- Use some other means of deleting the usn journal?
- Something else?
Best Answer
The longer you use a failing drive the worse and more unreliable it becomes. So if this data is important to recover I would begin backing it up sooner than later. So at this point you might want to skip the chkdsk stuff since you potentially have limited time if the drive decides to stop working altogether.
There are also a number of tools to clone the drive. I find the most reliable to be a tool called dd_rescue. Essentially it makes a bit by bit copy of the hard drive, skipping over any bad or unrecoverable sectors it encounters. This is obviously slow and if the drive is failing to an extreme you might not be able to recover anything.
Another free tool to look at is called Unstoppable Copier. This one is used to recover specific files, which in many cases can be much more convenient than cloning the entire drive (for obvious reasons).
If neither of these tools help at this point, and the data is super important you should maybe consider taking it to a data recovery company.