Hard Drive Failure Need Help

So this started with when I was trying to drag some files from this disk to my NAS, windows started to provide me file was corrupted, but I can open the file with no problem. So I tried to restart the computer and boom I can’t access the drive anymore.

I tired plugging into my Mac and test with programs such as DiskDrill and it stays there is bad sectors.

I tired on my windows and disk manager read it as RAW, but CHKDSK reads it as ntfs, but got no access to it.

HDtune Pro’s scan run so long with damaged % keeps going up.

I want to recover the files as I was just starting to back my drive up. Any advice? I have a Mac, Windows pc and Raspberry Pi running raspbian buster.

Thanks in advance.

The current software that I have used for this type of thing is Stellar data recovery. So far it works quite well, but it is proprietary and you will need to buy it to perform the recovery. There are free and open source solutions, but I have yet to actually get any of them to recover data, though I have not spent much time on most of them.

If the controller board on the drive is the problem or if there is physical damage inside the drive then software recovery is not likely to help much. If the controller board is the problem and you have or can find a drive of the same model you might be able to swap boards and recover.

If the above suggestions don’t help then in most cases just to find out if there is any recoverable data would generally cost more than the data is worth or you are willing to pay, which is why backups are important before the drive fails.

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The very first thing you do when there is a sign of corruption or a better early warning system S.M.A.R.T error, you do NOT want to write to that drive ever again, this will cause further corruption and a less of a chance to recover desired data.

I rarely do data recovery, but here’s a chance that I found and used in the past: https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/

It served me well when using spinning rust as my daily driver, I hope if will also serve you well too.

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Use a live USB of any Linux you like to image the drive via ddrescure as @Shukaze suggested. You will need a drive large enough to fit the disk image on.

From there you can copy the image and attempt data recovery with testdisk or run photorec for specific files. There’s many guides out there for these programs if you need help. Let me know if you get stuck.

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a point ive been hammering home since my dos days!
backups are cheap insurance when it comes to your data.

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First determine how critical the data on the drive is.

if you absolutely can not risk data loss send it to a recovery center where they will mitigate the best they can any further data loss.

i have good success with Gilware and Segate recovery services.

if the data is not that critical and you can risk loss then go ahead and image the drive with the aforementioned tools such as dd rescue or dd or even work with it in test disk. you will need another clean drive to transfer the image/files to.

good luck

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