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  • #1

    Hard Drive Failure

    posted by: dkerr

    Don't you just love computers, the day before I was going to buy a spindle of dvd's and burn backups of most things, yesterday a 1 tb secondary hard drive all of a sudden disappeared. Several thousand pictures was on that 2nd drive.

    Not going to throw it out quite yet until all hope of any or partial recovery is lost. One piece of software I downloaded and tried to scan this drive to see if it recover anything was telling me it would take about 5 to 7 months running this to scan the whole drive, really??

    Is there anything out there that can scan a large drive in less time? The drive was about 90 % full. I cannot even be sure if the platters are spinning, the recovery software is coming up with large number of media errors but not sure it can detect a non spinning platter error but cannot run this for several months to check the results.
    Tags: failure, hard drive
  • #2
    posted by: dkerr

    IS there a way to confirm the cause, and narrow it down to rather it is the logic board or the disk itself? I will buy the exact same hard drive again if I thought there was any chance of piecing one together long enough to copy what is on the failed drive.

    hard drive error

    The pic is from disk management (windows 8) disk 1 is the 1 tb drive and it will not initialize.

    Comment

    • #3
      posted by: chrisb

      Is this an internal drive or an external USB type drive? If external perhaps you could remove the drive from the housing and install it internally.
      There are companies you can send the drive to for recovery. I don't know the costs however.

      Comment

      • #4
        posted by: dkerr

        Sata 2 drives, system drive internal,

        have two docking bays on computer, where the second 1 tb drive is that failed, have tried moving it to the other docking bay and still not coming up.

        Comment

        • #5
          posted by Mr T

          Commercial recovery is VERY expensive. They often take the drive apart in a clean room and rebuild it. In severe cases they go almost bit by bit (think 1,000,000,000,000 x 8). Then factor in their hourly rate. Their equipment can also recover (some) data even after several formats. The FBI claims to be able to retrieve data that has been overritten 17 times. Ive heard a report recently that someone recovered some data 35 levels deep. If you hear mechanical noises like metal on metal then this is your only hope for a partial recovery. Do not plug the drive back in if you hear that. That noise is your data being turned to dust.

          Is this a NTFS formatted drive? I would start with something similar to Norton. A local (experienced) computer shop may have more advanced recovery programs (I've heard not so good things about Norton lately). You may get lucky with several hours of bench time. If it's ReFS then you may be on your own.. too new.

          Keep in mind that any recovery attempt may be more destructive to your data.

          If you have enough cable you can pick up the drive and rotate it side to side and you will feel the gyroscopic effects of the spinning platters if they are spinning. If they are not spinning, I would think that the drive would not even show up in disc management. I've saved a drive by frankensteining it once. But that was 15+ years ago. I wouldnt suspect a bad board unless it's not spinning.

          If you have a Linux box you can try to mount it in it. Their disc management is much better, but be careful because you can delete a partition without warning.

          Comment

          • #6
            posted by: dkerr

            I don't have much hope, but trying a recovery program that can take months is not workable, this program appears to take 4 days for a 120 gig drive recovery at that rate it is more than a month I would have to have a dedicated computer to run something that long and a ups and hope it did not hang or crash during that time. It is ntfs formatted.

            I will not throw it out yet but do not have a lot of hope at the moment.

            Comment

            • #7
              posted by: dkerr

              Before making further unlikely recovery options on the failed drive; I bought several spindles of blank dvds and I am burning everything needed saving from the primary drive, have bought a ide to usb adapter and going through all the no longer used old IDE drives before discarding them.

              When I get to writing the internet sections of new websites there is nothing I will make a point the absolute need to never put everything on an only hard drive and the need to keep up to date multiple copy backups of everything.

              Comment

              • #8
                posted by: chrisb

                I have a second hard drive installed in my tower just for making Ghost backups. If I ever get a virus or messed up I restore from ghost image.
                This reminds me. Time to make a new image. That will be my job for tonight.

                Removable USB drives are good this option as well.

                Comment

                • #9
                  posted by: Mr T

                  I always destroy hard drives when I am done with them. I don't sell them or even toss them. Uncorrupted data is easily recoverable and can be recovered even after several formats. They are great for recycling and scrap metal value.

                  Lots of aluminum in the drives (almost all of the metal is aluminum) and also some of the best magnets you will ever find. Be careful with them, I have caused several blood blisters from them snapping to something near my fingers. They are strong enough that I can put one on each side of the middle of my hand and they will hold in place. They are also very fragile once if removed from the plate they are (very lightly) glued to if they are at all)


                  I also use a external USB drive but it is attached to my Linux computer (less prone to crashes and viruses). I have my data storage areas on my windows computer and my laptop shared so it can be mounted on my linux system where it is automatically backed up on a regular basis.

                  I don't use it but you might want to look at cloud backups with the amount of data you have. It is one of the more secure and safest ways to store/backup data. It's encrypted, protected by industry security and environmental (server room) standards, constantly backed up, 99.99% (or 99.999...i forget) availability (industry availability standard goal) and your data is hidden is among petabytes or even exabytes of data. The downsize is you pay by the Gig.

                  Comment

                  • #10
                    posted by: dkerr

                    I don't think I will look into the cloud backups but I am certainly going to be doing frequent backups to DVDs from now on currently backing to 3 copies of dvd's for everything I do not want to lose. My even in addition to that use multiple hard drives.

                    I am currently running a quick scan on the failed drive, up to 3.2 gigs completed at the moment of 195.3 gigs showing the hard drive, no results yet, I expect if anything it will be once that scan is complete, there is also a deep scan mode available. Using a problem called 'Stellar Phoenix NTFS Data Recovery' don't have a lot of hope but nothing to lose, the program sees the hard drive, but not windows 'my computer' itself.

                    Donald Kerr

                    Comment

                    • #11
                      posted by: dkerr

                      6 days into the defective hard drive scan, likely about 15 percent through it, it is not going by gigs by scanning sector by sector.

                      Now what is the chances of needing a reboot or having a computer crash before it is finished, not sure if there is a resume with this program.

                      It is does crash on me I will have to get use a docking station with usb interface hooked up to a laptop I am not using, and hide it away somewhere and not use it until it is finished, likely will need a ups so the docking station can not kill it if the power dips.

                      It still may be fruitless but have nothing to lose.

                      hard drive checking

                      Comment

                      • #12
                        posted by: dkerr

                        I give up...

                        After over 2 weeks of running a recovery scan of the defective hard drive and being just under half way through it, windows update forces a reboot never had any chance of cancelling it, just a 50 second warning to save work with no cancel button (windows 8).

                        Now the drive does not even exist to even select and scan it to recover anything. Trying Linux does not see it either.

                        The lesson...
                        backup, backup, backup, never wait for the hard drive to fail first.

                        Comment

                        • #13
                          posted by: Howc

                          there is another program option which takes hours at best and it might still work when nothing else will. Its called Kroll Ontrack recovery, I have personally used it successfully many times. Its available for like 80 bucks I think....

                          Comment

                          • #14
                            posted by: dkerr

                            That particular recovery software I have not tried yet but have tried several others, but unless it has some unique way of making windows recognize the existence of the defective hard drive I am not holding out a lot of hope. But will read up on its program features.

                            Comment

                            • #15
                              posted by: wannabe

                              Hi dkerr,

                              When my drive crashed, I used Spinrite and had good results. Not knowing what caused the drive to crash is what makes recovery difficult.

                              wb

                              Comment

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