Recover files from a failing hard drive: image it first
A drive that’s slow to respond, freezes Finder or Explorer, disconnects, or makes new noises is telling you something. Every hour it runs may be one of its last, so the order you do things in matters.
Don’t browse around or run repairs on a failing drive. Make one full image: read every block once, retry bad spots in small pieces, and note what couldn’t be read. Then recover and verify from the image file. If the drive clicks or grinds, stop and call a professional lab.
Signs a drive is failing
- Files take ages to open, or the computer freezes when you open the drive.
- The drive disconnects and reconnects on its own.
- New clicking, ticking, buzzing or grinding sounds.
- The SMART health check reports problems. Retrova shows this for each drive on its home screen where the drive reports it.
Why image first
Browsing a failing drive makes it seek back and forth over the same weak areas again and again. An image reads each block exactly once, front to back, which is the gentlest way to get everything. After that, all the slow work happens on the image file on a healthy drive.
Make an image with Retrova
- Choose the failing drive under A drive won’t open, then Copy the whole drive to an image.
- Pick a destination on a healthy drive with at least as much free space as the failing drive’s size. Empty areas are stored sparsely, so the file often takes less real space.
- Retrova reads the drive front to back in one pass. When a chunk won’t read, it retries it in small pieces so one bad spot doesn’t cost the data around it. Anything still unreadable is filled with zeros in the image and listed in a log next to it.
- If the drive drops out, reconnect it and resume. Work already done is kept.
- Open the image file in Retrova and recover from it as if it were the drive, then Verify your copies.
When to stop
Clicking or grinding usually means the read heads are failing. Each power-on can scratch the platters further. If the data matters and the drive sounds mechanical, power it off and contact a professional data recovery lab. Software can’t fix hardware.
Get Retrova
Free and open source for macOS 11+ and Windows 10/11. No account, no recovery limit, and it never writes to the drive you’re rescuing.
Download RetrovaFree for Mac and WindowsQuestions
How long does imaging take?
Roughly as long as reading the whole drive once: a few hours for a healthy 1 TB drive, longer when there are many bad areas. Retrova shows progress and lets you pause and resume.
Do I need a drive as big as the failing one?
You need enough free space for the image. Empty areas are stored sparsely, so the image file often uses less space than the drive’s full size.
Does this work for SSDs too?
Yes. Failing SSDs and USB sticks often turn read-only or start returning errors. Imaging them once is still the safest first step.