External 2TB hard drive going bad? Recovery process?

[GeoFan49]

Finding a few bad sectors on external 2TB hard drive, about 2 years old, only used for Time Machine backups and a few smaller partitions ... What apps (under $20) can help me salvage my external 2TB drive that has one 50GB partition with a few bad sectors?

In the old days (1960s on minicomputers) you could simply set a few flags, skip bad files, and mark disk sectors bad... is there no salvation today with standard Mac OS without resorting to the command line or costly apps?

I simply want to find out what files (if any) are in those few bad sectors, and skip them, mark the sectors as bad, spare (reassign) them, and watch out for future indications of any bad sectors.

I get an "Input/Output error" from DiskUtility (vague error) when I try to copy the partition... half way done... 15~20 minutes into the 45 minute copy operation...

If I try to copy the whole partition to a folder on another drive, after 15~20 minutes I get a "read error" and the copy fails about 25 GB into a 50 GB copy.

The DriveDX app (under $5) tells me there are just a few bad sectors, but won't tell me the LBAs or file names...

 

[GeoFan49]

I had initially discovered (last week) that there were some bad sectors — when I tried to use DiskUtility to copy that 50GB partition to a 64 GB USB flash drive. It failed every time I tried.

Now I am perplexed at why I cannot simply find out what files are in the bad sectors.

The 2TB external drive was formatted (2 years ago) using 10.6.8 and used mostly for a daily Time Machine backup, in the a 1.8 TB partition, and a few special projects in some smaller partitions.

One of those smaller partitions now has a few bad sectors.

 

[GeoFan49]

Now looking at this

http://scsc-online.com/Scannerz.html

which may be very helpful at a reasonable cost.