Julian, welcome to these User Forums.

Acronis True Image is purely a Backup & Recovery application, where Recovery means the ability to recover the contents that have been previously stored in a backup image file.

It does not offer any data recovery operations for dealing with bad sectors or corrupted file systems, as you appear to have.

ATI will also have issues with significant numbers of bad sectors unless you were to take the option to 'ignore all' such sectors, which would allow you to make a backup copy of the drive contents "as is" before attempting any other form of data recovery.

If your data on these drives is really important to you, then you may be best advised to employ the services of a commercial data recovery company who will have all the necessary forensic data recovery tools for this purpose.

Otherwise, there are a variety of available free and paid tools that you can try to use on your problem drives.

See Google search: "disk drive data recovery" which gives links for both of the above options.

Note: I would recommend using ATI to make a full 'sector-by-sector' backup of each drive but you would then need another drive of similar size for each backup as the image size would be very close to the actual drive size, i.e. 3TB / 6TB

Another option that you could consider would be to purchase a Dual-drive docking station with hardware cloning capabilities, which could copy your drives without using any Windows OS. I have the following such dock that I purchased from Amazon with those capabilities.

ORICO Aluminium USB 3.0 to SATA Dual Bay Hard Drive Docking Station with Offline Clone Backup Function for 2.5 Inch & 3.5 Inch HDD SSD SATA I/ II/ III Supports UASP and 2 x 8 TB (SATA III 6Gb/s), Tool-free

This is shown as not available on Amazon UK, but there are links to similar products lower down the page.

Thank you so much for the amazing help and advice Steve!!!  I was hoping to hear from you.  Reading some of your previous posts has been interesting and enlightening.  You know your stuff!  The help you give is very beneficial to people far and wide. 

I made a backup before the drives went bad, but I lost about a month of data.  I'm a professional photographer, but in this case I didn't lose any client photos.  There stuff I would very much like back, but in this case I'd rather give it a shot myself, rather than paying money to data professionals.

If buying one of these might help copy the drive with bad sectors, that sounds like a fine approach for $40.  It seems like a useful thing to have all-around.  https://amzn.to/2lqAYve

From what you're implying, that might have a chance of helping with both Drive #1 and Drive #2.  I would not have assumed that the firmware in a $40 little drive copy device like that would have the smarts to deal with problems like bad sectors or partition issues.  But it certainly doesn't hurt to give it a shot.  :-)  I plan to order that later today.

Drive #1: Bad Sectors

Drive #1 is less critical to me. Buying a similar drive is $90.  And these days, a 3TB drive feels tiny.  I'd kinda be spending $90 and then never using the drive again.  Which is doable, but I'd like to try a cheaper solution first.

When I tried doing the copy with robocopy, it locks up when it hits a bad sector.  In other words, I may need to pick an approach that maps out the bad sectors first and then tries to copy afterwards.

First... Using ATI and indicating 'ignore all' to the bad sectors sounds like something I should try right away.  I'll try copying onto a drive that is functional, but larger than the original drive.  The fact that they are not the same size and such is likely to cause problems.  But I'll give it a shot first.

And as soon as the $40 hardware drive copy device  arrives... and I'll try copying it onto another Western Digital drive which is not the same size it all (I'll be copying onto a much larger WD drive).  But if it doesn't work, that's okay.  Then I'll try the next approach.

Drive #2: The File structure is missing 

Incidentally, here are the "chkdsk /f /r" results: http://bit.ly/lost_partition_chkdsk

My assumption is that the hardware drive copying device will be better at dealing with bad sectors than something as complicated as lost partition info.  But that's just a guess.

I care about the data on this drive more than the other.

Recuva and EaseUS both seem like they might be fine approaches.

I think I will first try EaseUS partition recovery wizard, since it's specifically about partitions.  

—

Steve, if you have any additional thoughts on this, I'm super interested.  :-)

And of course once I have my data back, I should be using ATI to do the upfront work, to reduce the odds of future problems like this.

Thanks a gazillion!

— Julian

Julian, in the product information for the Inateck clone dock on Amazon it says:

Attention
- The target disk must be larger than the source disk.
- Please backup files in target hard drive before cloning. Any files in target hard drive will be overwritten when offline clone works.
- Please make sure that there aren't any bad sectors on the drives in use, as to avoid data transfer errors, overheating and damage to the station.
- When one drive is working in the docking station, please do not remove the other one or insert a new one until it's finished in case of data loss. Please power off the docking station before removing.

So there is a warning there about bad sectors, but then again in the reviews from users further down the page, there are good testimonials about recovering crashed drives that were not recognised by any Windows PC..!  Given that this is a non-Windows / hardware / firmware cloning solution, I would definitely give it a go!  The only obvious warning here is to ensure that you install the drives in the correct slots!  The device will not warn you about cloning from the new drive to your problem drive to be recovered if you get them the wrong way round!

For your drive #2 - the CHKDSK results look normal which makes me wonder if the drive is just not being given a valid drive letter?  If you look in Disk Management, does it show a drive letter, and if not, are you able to use the option available to give it one?

Thanks again Steve! 

Drive #1

Just to reflect some of the things you said...

• Don't accidentally confuse the destination with the source desk.  Because, that would be... bad.  LOL.
• The destination disk should the same size or bigger.
• Bad sectors may make it fail, but who knows, since some folks have had luck anyway.

I ordered the disc copying hardware thingy and will have it in three days.  I'll give that a shot first.  If that doesn't work, it's on to software solutions that me map out bad sectors.  But this seems like an incredibly easy thing to try.  

Drive #2

Yup, chkdsk acts like everything is fine.

But the data is not accessible.  It does get a drive letter.

The snapshot below gives a better sense of it. 

I'm about to try partition fixing software. 

You are amazing Steve!  :-)

— Julian

Julian, if you haven't already done so, then download a 30-day trial copy of ATI 2018 and make a backup of your drives to a backup location as protection against any mistakes later, or when tired!

For drive #2, is this on the same computer where this drive was connected previously?  Try giving the drive a different letter and see if it makes any difference?  Stranger things happen!

One further thought, one approach that I use on occasion is to use a Live Linux distribution to boot from instead of Windows, i.e. Ubuntu 18.04 which you can boot from without needing to install - this can mount and read NTFS disks and may offer a way of recovering some of your files.

Spectacular Steve,

I purchased ATI 2018 before posting here.
It's happily installed and updated, though I haven't played with it yet.
I positively plan to be using it.  But my current aim is to have things a bit more stable first.

Drive #1
I'll have the new hardware copy thingy on Sunday.

Drive #2
Changing the drive letter didn't end up making a difference, but I love the concept.  And yes, stranger things have happened. :-)

I'm running recovery software on it which says it will run for 5 days.  It has said that it's found close to 1 million files already.

I give it good odds that what I get back will be convoluted.  Such as... No more directory structure and half the files mangled.
But time will tell.  My fingers and toes are crossed.

Thanks for giving such great advice.  It now feels like I'm not alone in this odd hard drive adventure.

For me it looks like it's now mostly a waiting game for a few days... till my hard drive copy thingy shows up... and the recovery software finishes.

Super appreciative, 
— Julian

Let us know how things work out please Julian.

The WD disk drive utility can fix errors that the window command cannot. You would probably need to use the extended test to have a chance of fixing this problem. But I would not do this before doing a sector by sector backup.

I have had problems with file system corruption (disks from PVR formatted with JFS). There is an Windows App that I use when this happens which cost me about 40€. It copes with a wide range of file systems, some of which are quite obscure. Cannot remember what it is called- only have access to my iPad at the moment.

Ian