Toshiba 3Tb worked fine for 17 hrs until..

nowasus · Apr 19, 2014

Toshiba DT01ACA300
Data storage HD, not a system disk.

produced - May 2013
SN-53JVSWWGS
Confirmed current driver/firmware

The drive was from the outset set up with a quick format of 16k cluster size as GPT with no partitions. Copied nicely at 90-150Mb/s

Until I managed to move 2.2Tb worth of files. Suddenly the drive hanged.

Upon system reboot, Win7 repeatedly would not come up past color balls. Quickly installed another win7 on another drive and in that install the win7 would boot no problem with Toshiba 3Tb drive needing to be "imported" and was visible in Windows Explorer in so far as free and full capacity numbers, but would not allow itself to be opened up further.

Now back in the original win7 install the drive is visible in Disk Management as a dynamic disk, "healthy" and "online" but Windows Explorer or RECUVA recovery application do not see it.

All diagnostics performed by SeaTools show that it is alive and fine.

Since I now have some valuable data on it how do I get access to it? Should I begin to worry
Any wisdomers? Many thanks.

PS. Just some details about my system:
mobo - asus M5A97 EVO R2.0
proc- FX6300
latest BIOS

popatim · Apr 20, 2014

try using testdisk from cg security.

and valuable data always needs to have backup copies (or three) made.

nowasus · Apr 21, 2014

Thanks for that.
I looked over some free applications, but none gained my confidence. Instead I tried a demo version of Active File Recovery application and liked, that it managed to id most of the drive as well as many unreadable sectors. So i decided to purchase it for $30 and am in process of recovering data.

I have confidence, that I will reclaim most of my files an pictures, however I am pondering the cause of it all.

Is the drive bad or is my win7pro64 unable to address the 3tb size in spite of me doing everything (I believe) I needed to in order to prevent that.

Or perhaps the drive is perfectly fine, but win7pro64 is still quirky in properly working it's 3tb size. If that were the case, I intend to reformat the drive an dpartition it in two 1.5tb separate logical drives and hopefully that will be the end of further problems.
Any thoughts on that? Thanks.

popatim · Apr 21, 2014

If a drive is going to fail early its often withing the first few weeks.
I'll assume this was a bare drive and typically poor packaging and I already know how shippers treat packages...

Anywho... I always run my drives for a while before using them just to make sure they will be ok. If they are going into my server I will run them for a month on my pc first.

Lastly, never move or cut files. Always just copy & paste, this leaves you with a 2nd copy *just in case* (I have backup OCD if you haven't noticed) Sometimes the paste doesnt work and your cut files will just vanish *poof* - gone.

nowasus · Apr 24, 2014

Thanks for your reply. Indeed you are absolutely correct and I may have to review my approach going forward.
I have mostly saved my situation. Using the program called Active File Recovery (29.95 usd) I was able to "reach" the problematic drive and without much issue reclaim 1.5TB out of 2.3TB of data. The rest however is becoming more difficult since perhaps there are sector errors and have to go file by file.
In the mean time I have pondered other ways to help my situation and have verified the alignment of this drive, which turned out to be fine, but is know to be an issue with Toshiba advanced format units.
When at the beginning I did quick format this drive, I specified GPT (instead of MBR) which is correct considering win7pro64 and UEFI bios I am running. However I also specified 16k as sector size instead of "default" which typically is 4k or 512bytes. So in this I sense the problem causing oncompatibility which manifested itself once I accumulated 2,3TB causing the drive to be invisible to windows. When the problem started the drive had just 17 hrs of running and never had a mechanical shock issue to speak of, so definitely this is an issue of some "logic" taking over.

As soon as I transfer over remaining files, I plan to reformat the drive to default seettings and partition it under GPT into 2 halves since I would like to believe the drive is not defective or damaged at all. I will post my findings.

Any suggestions for verifying the soundness of function and sectors after I do reformat and before I start migrating data to it?

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Toshiba 3Tb worked fine for 17 hrs until..

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