Disk Recoup

Disk Recoup is a lightweight software application whose purpose is to help you clone faulty hard drives that may have bad or unstable sectors.

It is important to mention from the beginning that the utility is not able to clone hard drives in case they have mechanical failures and have completely failed (they do not respond to any disk commands) or the hard drive is not detected by BIOS when the computer is turned on.

Disk Recoup is able to clone IDE and SATA drives, as well as SCSI, SAS and USB drives. It works with Zip drives, CD, DVD, memory cards such as Memory Stick, CompactFlash, MMC, SD, and other removable devices.

The GUI looks clean and easy to decode. The tool doesn’t embed a lot of configuration settings as it employs straightforward actions for helping you carry out the job. You may check the help manual in case you want to find out more about the utility’s features.

Disk Recoup copies raw data from the source hard drive to the destination by replicating the information sector by sector and byte by byte. In order to work properly, the destination hard drive must be empty and have the same size or larger than the source drive. Both hard drives need to have the same sector size.

The cloning process can be carried out by selecting the faulty drive as the source and choosing a destination which can be either a dedicated blank hard drive or disk image file (DSK or DRS file format).

Statistics are shown about the current and average rate, elapsed and total time, as well as estimated time. Plus, you can resume a disk copy section and export log files to CSV file format. Last but not least, you can omit sectors from the copy task and optimize the cloning process in order to copy data in a short amount of time.

All things considered, Disk Recoup delivers an intuitive and basic feature pack for cloning hard disks with bad sectors. The copying process may take a long time (up to several hours) so be prepared to arm yourself with plenty of patience. On the downside, the utility hasn’t been updated for a long time, so it proves to be efficient especially if you run it on older operating systems.