Clicking Seagate 2TB Barrcuda, is it really all over? Really need your advice.

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Jon1962

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Dear friends, really need your advice. I have a 2TB barracuda internal HDD which is experiencing clicking problems. It clicks for about 10 seconds after boot up and then stops clicking. There are no grinding sounds. HDD is undetectable in Bios and windows does not boot up.

It happened 2 days ago when my computer hung and I did a dirty restart by switching off and then on. After being unable to access my bios, I restarted it a few times and the HDD started to click. I tried booting it up a few times to try my best to fix it after which I left it alone and stopped using it.

After trawling the net for info, I am really worried about the platter scratching as I have very precious family memories inside. What are the chances of platter scratching and making any form of recovery? I am prepared to send it to a professional firm..

It was my fault for not backing up and I truly learnt my lesson this time around. If it helps, my HDD has about 300 GB empty. Around 3.5 years old - I did not drop the drive.
 
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Damage on platters cannot be fixed. Where there is damage, there is potentially data loss. It is possible the damage occurred in an unused are of the hard drive, which would be lucky. There is also a possibility that you may end up with a decent number of pics that are partially recovered. Hard drives don't write files all nice and neat in one are on a platter. Oh no, they can spread a single file out to multiple surfaces on other platters in the drive. So, if a larger file (like a JPG or raw photo) has parts of it saved on 3 different platter surfaces, and there is damage on one of those surfaces, only about 66% of the file may be recovered.

A likely reason for the slow progress is that they had to put a new set of read/write heads in...
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warhead0

warhead0

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It does infact sound like the HDD has failed, it is unfortunate but it happens.

If the data on the device was important, there are services out there that will attempt to recover your data, but at a usually large cost.
 
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warhead0

warhead0

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I can't really say for sure, but your failure sounds perhaps more of a 'header' issue and hopefully your platter is in a fairly good condition still.

But I don't have the tools to find out and I'm only a guy on the internet, if you want to try and recover the data, unplug the drive and DO NOT USE IT ANYMORE.

you risk damaging it further.

Hope that helps
 
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RolandJS

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Get thee to a data recovery person/place, like today. The more one tries software and more software and more software to fix what is probably a HD physically failing, the harder and longer and more expensive data recovery will be.
 
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Jon1962

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I just got back my drive from Kroll ontrack who said the data is unrecoverable but did not offer anymore explanation or details as to why it was unrecoverable. It is very strange and i am terribly upset after losing all my treasured family photos. Why..
 
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Jon1962

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I have gotten the diagnosis back from another company who said there was a small scratch on the outer rim of the platter. Apparently they will do refurbishing on the platter and try again to recover. What are the odds of success?
 
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velocityg4

velocityg4

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Only they would know that. I'd like to think they would only try if they thought it would work. Any data in the immediate vicinity of the scratch is lost. Files in the those tracks are likely too corrupt. There is a chance any data after the scratch is recoverable. Along with data on the other platters and other side of the damaged platter.
 
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Jon1962

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Dear Velo, usually in these cases, what are the % of data that gets recovered? Mine has 4 surfaces and only 1 has a minor scratch. How will the imaging process work?
 
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Jon1962

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my data recovery company managed to get the drive to start imaging but it is taking a long time to complete. After the drive is imaged, does it mean it is recoverable?
 
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velocityg4

velocityg4

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All it means is they are essentially cloning bit of raw data they can from your bad drive to a good drive. In order to minimize the risk of further degradation. Then from the good drive they will try to retrieve all the data they can from the corrupt file system.

It has no bearing on whether the data imaged will be good or not. Nor how much is good. Nor if what you want is good. No one can answer that question until the process is complete. That process starts with Drive Restoration which has been completed. It then moves on to Disk Imaging which it is currently in. Then it moves to Data Retrieval. Data Retrieval is a multi-step process.

If you want to read more about it.
http://www.deepspar.com/wp.html
 
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Jon1962

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Thanks Velocity, right now they have successfully refurbished the scratched area and have gotten the drive to start imaging (which is taking a long time, around 5-6% daily). After this imaging process, you mention it goes to data retrieval, may I know what occurs at this process ?
 
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RolandJS

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Presently, that means: the DR folks will soon have an exact copy of the original HD as-is. Then, with that spare HD in the wings, they will go to work on recovering what is recoverable.
 
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Jon1962

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how do we determine what is recoverable? If they have an exact copy of the original drive, shouldnt all data be readable?
 
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velocityg4

velocityg4

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They have an exact copy of the damaged drive. Meaning they have an exact copy of data which is not completely destroyed.

It's like if you have a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. Then you make a copy of that puzzle. Your copy will not have the complete puzzle. Just the puzzle with missing pieces.

Now which pieces are missing and how many is unknown. You will not know that until the process is complete. No answer I or anyone else can give you will answer that question.

The link I posted. Says what happens in data retrieval. Quoted below.
"Data Retrieval: The original files that were copied onto the image drive are retrieved. Data retrieval can involve these tasks:
File system recovery: The recreation of a corrupted file system structure such as a corrupted directory structure or boot sector, due to data loss. This task is accomplished by using a product such as PC-3000 Data Extractor by ACE Laboratory Russia.
File verification: Recovered files are tested for potential corruption. DeepSpar provides a file verification tool for this task which generates a report that can be delivered to the client.
File repair: If necessary, corrupted files are repaired. Files might be corrupt because data could not be fully restored in previous phases, in which case disk imaging is repeated to retrieve more sectors. File repair is completed, where possible, using vendor-specific tools."
 
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Jon1962

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yes sir, i have learnt my lesson the hard way. Just hoping that I can have a second chance at this. They reported that my transfer rate was really slow due to platter damage, is it normal and can the drive be 100% imaged?
 
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RolandJS

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To your first most recent question, my answer: imminent and finally platter damage probably led to slow transfer speeds; your 2nd question, my answer -- that HD will never reach 100% imaged.

addendum: I saw the next post quoting me; saw my error, fixed it in here.
 
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