Please help me diagnose my hard drive failure and any data recovery suggestions...

sherbieDice

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Aug 12, 2013
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10,510
Hi all,

I have a Hitachi SATA3 2TB HDD that I've been using as a normal external storage device (via 3rd party USB 3.0 enclosure).

A couple weeks ago I was still able to see the drive appearing on My Computer (I use windows 7), and I can access the harddrive's content and file system / directories, even though it took ridiculous amount of time to render photos from some folders, for example, I had a folder which contained about 1000 JPG's (each ~1mb) images, it'd always load and load and load... until the explorer.exe freezes and have to close the window.

Being a fool I ignored this symptom and didn't action on it, until a few days back windows stopped recognising the HDD and told me to re-format it in order to use it, obviously I didn't do that as all my important data are still on it.

I did a lot of research on Data Recovery since but I'm still not sure what is the cause of the failure or what the best solution is, here are the things I've tried:

- TestDisk: I was able to access the file system, so I can traverse the directories that is on the HDD via the command-line-like TestDisk, however, I found that a lot of files are missing from the folders that they're supposed to be in, for example, I had ~500 images and 3 sub-folders in a directory, now I can only see 4 images in that directory and nothing else.

- PhotoRec: I have been running the search for about 6 hours, so far recovered 40 files, and when it started off, it said estimated time of completion is 5 hours, but now the estimated completion time is 6308 hours (no joke!) and still going up by the minute... So I'm not sure if it is realistic.. I know it's a 2TB drive and I'm searching the entire drive, but it doesn't look like it will ever end.

p.s. I can't hear any unusual noises coming from the HDD.

My questions are:
1) Any take on the cause of disk failure? failed MBR? BAAAD Sector? Enclosure hardware? etc..
2) Is it likely that I'll be able to recover the missing files?
3) How would I go about doing that?
4) Any chance I can speed up the PhotoRec search? (I heard setting PhotoRec to the search only for specific file extesions help, but not tested yet).

I would go as far as freezing my HDD if necessary, that's how desperate I am..!

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thank you so much in advance!

- Sherman.
 

Paperdoc

Polypheme
Ambassador
Before doing any further work, I suggest you remove the HDD from the external case and mount it internally in your desktop machine. This will eliminate any problems that might originate with the case or the USB3 system.

Next, go to the Hitachi website and find / download their set of diagnostic utilities for HDD's. Install this on your main C: drive, and run it from there. I have not used theirs - I have other HDD's. Usually the set includes some simpler tools to check easy things like the SMART status, some short fast HDD testing tools, and some exhaustive all-of-the-disk testing tools. CHECK, but most of these do NOT damage any data on the disk. Beyond these, there will be other tools used to repair faulty disks if possible, but many of these DO destroy data and should warn you about that, so do NOT use those tools until you have made some data backups.

There's a reasonable chance you may get the unit to work just fine as an internal HDD, and find it has no problems. If that is what you find, the case is the most likely culprit. The other possibilities are the USB3 system in your computer, or the cable you've been using between them, or just a loose cable connection.

If the diagnostics tell you the HDD itself does have problems, it MAY have some suggestions of how to fix. But think carefully before proceeding. If the process of fixing might damage existing data, you'll want to find a way first to back up whatever you can before the repair work.

Either way, doing this with an internal HDD is quicker and easier that with a drive in an external case.
 

sherbieDice

Honorable
Aug 12, 2013
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10,510


I tried but it came up with the following window error:

"The disk check could not be performed because Windows can't access the disk."
 

sherbieDice

Honorable
Aug 12, 2013
9
0
10,510


Thanks for the suggestions, I'll have a crack at that and let you know how it went :)