Seagate 1tb external drive failing?

[masterofall]

My seagate expansion desktop external drive seems to be dying. Its only a year old but i've filled it upto 90% of its capacity and that is when the problem started. Drive will show in my computer, disk management and even folders/files are visible/accessible but somehow i cant copy them. If i try copying, i'm slapped with extremely slow transfer speeds as below. Besides that it wont read some of the files so i have to skip them

I have even tried recovery programs and all of them recognized the drive properly but couldnt recover anything

I'm on win 7 x64 and my problem is similar to the guy in this thread

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/246239-32-external-hard-drive-corrupting-failing-visible-copyable

I feel there is a problem with the usb enclosure and so i want to pry it open and connect to the computer just like an internal drive. Can i do that without voiding the warranty?

 

[masterofall]

Screenshot from HD Tune pro

 

[beefybish]

If you open the enclosure there's a good chance you'll void your warranty (but that all depends which company you bought it from, some are more lenient)

You probably want to contact the supplier before doing anything like that, first of all to check the warranty status, and secondly to see if they can help you. Some companies offer data recovery services if you desperately want the data that's on the drive.

However, before condemning the drive to it's grave, download and run the Seagate Seatools test, to see what exactly the issue is with the drive.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools

Hope this helps,
KB

 

[tomatthe]

Unlikely it's an enclosure problem based on how you are describing the issue, and the screenshot you posted. My suggestion would be to copy very small groups of files at a time and just try to get what you still can from it while it's still semi working. Contact manufacture as beefy mentioned to rma it after you've got the usable data off it.

 

[masterofall]

If you open the enclosure there's a good chance you'll void your warranty (but that all depends which company you bought it from, some are more lenient)

You probably want to contact the supplier before doing anything like that, first of all to check the warranty status, and secondly to see if they can help you. Some companies offer data recovery services if you desperately want the data that's on the drive.

However, before condemning the drive to it's grave, download and run the Seagate Seatools test, to see what exactly the issue is with the drive.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools

Hope this helps,
KB

I did run the Seagate Seatools test and the drive failed even the basic test and it returned more than 100 errors on Long generic test. By now i'm sure its failing and Seagate recovery service is quite expensive. Luckily I am able to get most of my personal pictures off the drive in time.

Unlikely it's an enclosure problem based on how you are describing the issue, and the screenshot you posted. My suggestion would be to copy very small groups of files at a time and just try to get what you still can from it while it's still semi working. Contact manufacture as beefy mentioned to rma it after you've got the usable data off it.

Yeah i am able to copy only files from within a folder at painfully low speeds and few of them not readable but its my fault i never cared to back them up. I should have seen whats coming. I've checked the drive for warranty and its covered till Nov 2013 so no worries about RMA.

I thank both of you for your help

 

[Paperdoc]

Given that your drive is failing and must be replaced, what you really need is to copy everything off it. I had to do that recently because a drive came up with high reallocated sector count on a SMART alert. I was replacing it, so I got a new HDD (actually, a used one I had spare) and cloned the old one to the new one.

Cloning is easy with the right software. In my case, I cloned TO a Seagate unit, so I downloaded and used their free utility package, Disk Wizard. If your Destination (new) HDD is by WD, get their free Acronis True Image WD Edition. With such a tool you can copy everything possible in one unattended operation, rather than manually trying to copy groups of files.

One thing I found is that the software kept stopping to tell me it has encountered an error as it tried to read certain sectors off the failing drive. Of course that makes sense - that's why the operation was started in the first place! So I simply chose the option to keep on working despite any errors found and without any need for further OK's. It took many hours to do the job, but it ran all by itself. Now, the risk here is that it may have been trying to copy an actual file with data I need, and been forced to copy a sector with bad data in it. In that case, the copied file on the new drive would be corrupted. As it turns out, I have found no such errors in the clone copy - it works perfectly so far. I guess all the errors it encountered were in sectors not being used by real files.

So, try a cloning operation and tell it to ignore bad sectors and keep on working until it finishes. Then plan to do something else while it works.

Incidentally, you don't HAVE to buy a new HDD right away to do this. If you have an existing HDD with Unallocated Space enough space on it to accept all the data from the failing drive, you can make a clone to a new Partition created (by the cloning software) in that space. Later you can clone this copy again to the final new HDD you get, then delete the first clone Partition from its temporary place. In doing this, check the details of the cloning software regarding the size of the cloned copy. By default it will try to make the clone the same size as the original Partition. But you can change that to any size you like, as long as it is big enough to hold all of the data you're copying from the Source, and small enough to fit onto the space available on the Destination Drive.

 

[masterofall]

Best answer selected by masterofall.

 

[Maziar]

This topic has been closed by Maziar