Portable Hard Drive With Bad Sectors

[Circuits]

You generally can't "repair" bad sectors that have physically failed - just mark them as bad in the allocation table and read/write around the failed sectors. The data in said failed sectors is only recoverable to the ability of the file format to withstand corruption and damage - not a huge, hairy deal with video files that already expect lossy compression, but bad for things like photo files that lack redundancy. Think of it as damage to the print or film stock on which it was recorded in that the damaged areas will be damaged for good, and you can only attempt to smooth or filter around them.

If you cannot read the disc now, then a data recovery program or service may be able to recover data for you from the undamaged areas, but if it's beyond a recovery program, that service gets very pricey, very quickly. To the tune of hundreds or thousands of dollars to attempt, and no guarantees.

[n8tive97]

You generally can't "repair" bad sectors that have physically failed - just mark them as bad in the allocation table and read/write around the failed sectors. The data in said failed sectors is only recoverable to the ability of the file format to withstand corruption and damage - not a huge, hairy deal with video files that already expect lossy compression, but bad for things like photo files that lack redundancy. Think of it as damage to the print or film stock on which it was recorded in that the damaged areas will be damaged for good, and you can only attempt to smooth or filter around them.

If you cannot read the disc now, then a data recovery program or service may be able to recover data for you from the undamaged areas, but if it's beyond a recovery program, that service gets very pricey, very quickly. To the tune of hundreds or thousands of dollars to attempt, and no guarantees.

Well crap, I hope it doesn't come to that! I would be willing to pay though, can't get these pics back.