Data drive stopped spinning up, Windows 10 can't initialize it and Linux doesn't see it

I used a program to copy partitions to another disk. The program stopped after about 15% and the operation didn’t work.

Windows 10 then asked me to format the disk which I didn’t want to do as I was analyzing it with a recovery tool that found lots of data. I decided I’d work on it the next morning.

I boot the pc and windows doesn’t see the drive as formattable and I can’t initialize it–it’s not spinning.

Is there a way Linux could see this drive in its un-initialized state?

You could try to mount the drive.

If the problem is the disk just not being seem this my allow you to access it. If the problem is the physical failure of the disk to spin than nothing will be able to read it because the disc has to be able to spin for the read arm to read the data.

If you’re trying to copy partitions to the disk but the operation failed, why would you then try to recover data from a failed copy?

I was in the process of looking at what would be recoverable because the source disk doesn’t function properly and I wanted to save some stuff, good news is that the data I wanted to recover had already been copied to my main windows drive as I’d accidentally deleted it (and successfully recovered it that same hour using Pirform’s Recuva software that made it possible to relocate the files.

I guess we’ll close this topic as the date code on the drive is well over 10 years (though definitely not used for more than what I’ve done with it, maybe seven years of dedicated storage), and I’m not sure if it’s worth the money to send it to a data recovery company. If I do then I’ll update or make a new topic because this drive worked just fine before I tried the partition copy fron it to another drive. This operation has rendered the disk unusable.

A couple days ago was “world backup day” – you don’t need a full disk copy, just save important stuff that you want to keep to flash memory or just your desktop until you have a backup disk for your data storage.

I keep a monthly backup of C: and should have keep more copies from my data disk, excluding the steam common folder and have a small image of that drive–that’ll be my extra backup on top of a full disk clone of storage.

Given that in fact, you have nothing to loose, try yhe following:
Get yourself a Linux Live CD, I’d suggest the sysrescuecd.org image, burn it on a suitable medium. Boot into a GUI, start a terminal and issue the command lshw
Scroll the output to see if the drive is mentioned. If it has, Linux can access it. Use the Photorec tool to recover data, you need a sizable space for that data though.

No guarantee it works though!

I’ll give it a try, let you know.

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