Sector exclusion

When File Scavenger® hangs on reading bad sectors, it will advise you to use this dialog to exclude the offending sectors from the next scan.

Alternatively, you can use Disk Recoup™ to read and clone the bad drive to a new blank drive. Then recover data from the new drive to avoid hardware errors. Visit https://www.quetek.com/diskrecoup for more information.

Another use for this is to focus on the relevant volumes. Considering the example below:

Disk 1: Total size of 20GB, formatted as drive D: with 4 GB followed by drive E: with 16 GB.

Suppose you are scanning Disk 1 in the Long scan mode and only drive D: is relevant, you can exclude sectors belonging to drive E: to reduce scan time.

4GB is equivalent to 4 x (1073741824/512) = 8388608 sectors. (If you know the exact size of drive D: in bytes, you can divide it by 512 to get the number of sectors)

Add some sectors (usually 2048 sectors) for the master boot record or partition table.

Add some safety margin for rounding off, etc.

You can then exclude from, for example, sector 8400000 to the last sector.

Drive

The disk or volume being scanned.

Sector range

The valid range of sector numbers for this drive.

First sector

Specifies the first sector of a range to be excluded.

Last sector

Specifies the last sector of a range to be excluded.

Add

Adds this range to the list.

Remove

Removes this range from the list.

Excluded sectors

Ranges of sectors to be skipped during the scan.

Read from file

Loads the sector ranges from a CSV file and adds them to the list. Each line follows this format: first_sector,last_sector.