Recovery on a dying HDD

papadadfather · Sep 17, 2017

I have had this 2TB internal Seagate HDD for ~5 years. It's for storage only, the OS is on another drive. Last night while qbittorent was writing something on it, the HDD started to make a repetitive, jarring sound. I was on my headphones so the sound could've been going on for a few minutes already.

Soon after when trying to access files on the drive, programs started lagging unable to read it. Qbittorrent also gave an error message. Then W10 froze completely and I had to do a hard reset.

Now after rebooting Windows' File Explorer can't see the drive. There's no letter assigned to it. Device Manager, Disk Management and Speccy see the hardware but the capacity is wrong. Speccy for example lists the size as 127GB (pic related).. this seems weird?

https://i.imgur.com/paVDRMQ.png

There's some stuff on the HDD I'd love to recover so I unplugged and set it aside for now.

What should be my next step?

ex_bubblehead · Sep 17, 2017

There's some stuff on the HDD I'd love to recover so I unplugged and set it aside for now.

What should be my next step?

A) Install a new hard drive and restore from your most recent backup (you DO make backups, right?)

B) Get the drive to a recovery service. Be prepared to pay handsomely, and do not expect 100% recovery.

Do NOT attempt recovery yourself. The more you futz around with it the less likely even a professional can recover anything.

papadadfather · Sep 18, 2017

ex_bubblehead :

Cheers.

I went against your advice and tried imaging the drive with OSFClone. I booted into it and it doesn't see the drive itself but does see the partition. I plugged in a 3TB USB HDD and start trying to pull an AFF image from the HDD. No weird noises or issues but it's over in just ~10min and the end result is a 50MB joke image. I mounted it but there's nothing there.

Maybe I messed up the recovery process or maybe the data is already gone. I don't know what I'm doing would rather not damage the HDD any worse so I took it out for now while pondering my next move.

Any new ideas based on this?

Neur0nauT · Sep 18, 2017

I would have ensured that the SATA cables were not to blame before anything else. I've had problems like this with bad/loose SATA cables in the past.

ex_bubblehead · Sep 18, 2017

papadadfather :

ex_bubblehead :

Cheers.

I went against your advice and tried imaging the drive with OSFClone. I booted into it and it doesn't see the drive itself but does see the partition. I plugged in a 3TB USB HDD and start trying to pull an AFF image from the HDD. No weird noises or issues but it's over in just ~10min and the end result is a 50MB joke image. I mounted it but there's nothing there.

Maybe I messed up the recovery process or maybe the data is already gone. I don't know what I'm doing would rather not damage the HDD any worse so I took it out for now while pondering my next move.

Any new ideas based on this?

See option "B", that's all you have left.

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Recovery on a dying HDD

papadadfather

Commendable

ex_bubblehead

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papadadfather

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Neur0nauT

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ex_bubblehead

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