hard drive - What software to use to recover data from Samsung HD103UJ HDD?

I have a Samsung HD103UJ 1TB SATA HDD which is malfunctioning, but not a complete brick.

If I try to boot off it, the boot takes forever and there is slow ticking sound.

If I hot-plug it into a running system it slows the system to a crawl, and never opens the drive it is mapped to.

Because Samsung HDD division has merged with Seagate I assumed it was perhaps manufactured by Seagate and just rebranded by Samsung, and therefore assumed SeaTools is going to work with it. Also the new websites seemed to send me in that direction.

So I ran SeaTools for Windows and got:

• SMART - Pass


• Short DST - Fail (code 6C9AC2A4, but message said it has bad sectors)

I booted into SeaTools for DOS and it did the long test and found 2 errors, but then failed to fix them. At the end it even said it is not a Seagate disk.

Anything I can do on my own to recover some data besides sending this to a data recovery firm (which is very pricey)?

How do I make it mark the bad sectors bad if SeaTools for DOS won't do it?

Perhaps SeaData isn't supposed to work with this drive?

So should I instead be downloading some obscure Samsung tool or even another tool altogether? MHDD perhaps?

Answer

If Karan had posted the comment as an answer, I would accept that.

I got about 99.9% of my data back with ddrescue, it was quite easy and free.

Thank you so much Karan for suggesting this!

Steps:

• Got bigger hard drive than old one, connected only the new drive and the old one to the system, disconnecting other drives


• Downloaded Ubuntu 12.10 Live CD


• Downloaded LinuxLive USB creator


• Burned Live CD to USB stick (DVD drive would take forever to boot)


• Booted up with the Live CD


• Found both drives in /dev/sd* , with very nice symbolic links already created by Ubuntu that specified which disk is which by name also there


• Installed ddrescue (for that I had to enable Universe repository by editing the apt repository list file, and do "sudo apt-get upgrade")


• Did something like "ddrescue -r 3 /dev/sda /dev/sdb logfile" ("-r 3" is for three retries on each bad sector, you can also skip it)


• Left it running for ~12 hours, periodically checking the logfile for progress


• Logfile obtained was very clear, showed I had exactly one bad sector and had lost only 8kb


• Shut down


• Swapped old drive for boot drive, ensured I'm booting from boot drive


• Mounted new drive in Windows, ran a Disk Check which fixed some issues and created a "Found" folder for the few files affected


• Checked the files in "Found" folder and they were both something unimportant