I’ve been running a 2TB Seagate drive for a few years without issue. It was only when I would save images from Facebook that it would take 5 to 10 seconds sometimes to allow me to save to the drive.
Only yesterday I was playing a game and every time it had to load a level it would take about 10 seconds and then stutter within the first few seconds of play. I’ve had this with the laptop as well but thought it was just a slow drive.
Anyway, after stopping the game I ran WIndows Check disk on it, initially it said it was fine but then it locked up on me. After ten minutes it came back. I then ran Firefox but it locked up, wouldn’t close properly even using Task Manager. So I had no choice but to reset.
Looking in the BIOS the drive had disappered and Windows was taking a lot longer to boot up. The drive was recognised in Disk Management but wasn’t initialised. When I tried (MBR or GPT) it would say the drive cannot be found.
I tried it in another machine and it was regonised in the BIOS but not in Windows. I then tried Disk Director to make a copy and got the message:
'Failed to read from sector 2,048 of hard drive 2. Try to repeat the operation. If the error persists, check the disk using Check Disk Utility and create a backup of the disk.'
It’s not available to read from, only the drive I want to copy to.
Are there any recommended Check Disk Utilities I could try on this disk? I do have a backup of a lot of the drive but would like to see if I can get one last gasp from it just to check.
That is in all likelihood an almost dead drive.
I would recommend unpluging it and plug it in over USB on another running system, then you may be able to check. Do NOT re-initilize the drive or anything and do not write anything to it if possible.
If you want a good tool for something like that then try Testdisk.
I can’t back it up as it won’t let me read from it. I’m thinking I might try Fix MBR or something like that as it’s still seen in Disk Management as Healthy and 1.7TB.
1.) Put the drive in the freezer for roughly 2 hours.
2.) Take it out of the freezer and give it about 3 minutes to warm up.
3.) Plug it into the computer.
4.) Copy off the stuff that you know was not previously backup up. rinse and repeat
This is how we used to do it in the old days. As a matter of fact I had a 1.5TB Seagate disk that was used as a backup drive fail on me just 2 years ago. After trying everything, I remembered this trick and it worked. I was able to copy all the raw data off using DD to a disk image onto an SSD via SATA (luckily had only ~400GiB of data on the drive at the time.).
I then tried to repeat it again using a USB adapter. For USB, it failed halfway through so I had to do this a couple of times. In general you only have about 30 minutes a shot depending on the drive density. Since mine was a backup drive, I needed to pull everything. DD was quickest since it is copying raw bits. In your case it may be faster since you have a pretty good idea of what had not been backed up.
Just like UPSes, I recommend spending the money on a 1Tib or 2Tib SSD and using that as your backup medium. With Intel and Crucial (maybe others), worst case scenario is that the disk locks itself into read only mode to prevent data loss. You won’t have a total brick, it preserves itself as a historical snapshot in time. I would say be careful of the Samsung drives. At least in the *nix worlds, those drives sometimes wipe themselves clean and only prevent access to the bad bits, meaning you can still lose everything.
Do NOT I repeat NOT put the drive in the freezer!!! Basic physics says that you will ruin the platters and everything else proabably, because for ex. condensated water that will build up.
If you want some proof watch this:
@Hako As I stated in my post, do it at your own risk. If the disk drive is going into the bin anyway, it is worth a shot. Now if OP said that they were going to send it in for data recovery, I would not have mentioned it.
OP,
Take heed to Hakko’s warning. This is literally something that you would do as a last ditch effort to get data off the drive. Each time you do this, you increase the chance of total drive failure. Once you have recovered your data from the disk, never trust it again. Make HDD speakers or scavenge the magnets.
Thanks but yeah, as I said I’ll put it in the freezer as a last ditch effort. After that I’ll probably take it apart so it’s irreparable. I’ve pretty much lost all hope in it already, so I can take a few risks.
Windows isn’t the greatest platform for trying to recover a hard drive. Ideally, you should make an image copy of the entire disk to a new drive or a file. Then you can attempt data recovery from that “backup”. There’s a utility for linux called ‘ddrescue’ that does this. I’m unaware of similar windows tools, but they likely exist.
Good luck.
The freezer trick is an old urban myth that seldom does anything. It would work on old drives that used ball bearings but drives today use hydrostatic bearings that when they blow their seal there is nothing to be done about it. Thats all assuming there is an issue with the bearing of course. If there wasnt you just froze a drive with a completely different issue. If you are going to suggest this you should at least tell people to ziploc it with a silica gel pack so it wont condense as bad before freezing and to leave it in the freezer while attempting recovery, which is hard to do.
In most cases where this does work, it would have been just as effective to let the drive cool to room temp before attempting another pass.
EDIT: Dont feel too bad because I was guilty of spreading this one too many years ago.
@Adubs
No offense taken. You bring up some good points. I should have not included only the lazy warning. And you are right. Depending on the issue, this may not work. But again, if he is planning on trashing the drive, it cannot hurt, right!?
With that said, maybe I have been lucky but I have been performing that trick for over 20 years for data recovery for myself and others who did not want to shell out 500+ for data recovery in a clean room. Room temp has never worked for me. I have done this with over 30 HDDs.
I live in the Pacific Northwest. My last drive failure was here and during the winter where room temp is normally in the 30s or 40s (We only heat the spaced that we use), the freezer trick worked. Granted I did use silica packs and the smallest zip locks that I could manage back in the day, I threw caution to the wind this last time after trying everything else for about 2 months. I think that the head was literally crashing against to platter. It was making a good awful squeal that only I and the neighbor’s dog could hear. I figured that the drive was toast already. Low an behold, the disk was recognized and I could read data off of it. I think that the platter was warped and the cold un-warped the platter just enough for the head to realign. Either way dd and 47 minutes later, I had a disk image that I could then safely play with.
For anyone else that reads this, don’t do this unless you have exhausted all of the non-destructive options that you are willing to pursue. Otherwise
I am not liable for any destruction or damage that putting your HDD into the freezer may cause. HDDs are not designed to be placed in extreme heat or extreme cold environments…basically do your research and make informed, educated decisions. Just because you read it on the Internet does not make it true…
You could always try running a bootable Linux USB on the computer that you have the drive in?
If it shows up in Disk Manager on Windows, there’s a decent likelihood that you can grab some stuff off the disk. Whether the data is corrupt or not may be another story. As a few others have mentioned, Windows is not the greatest for data recovery.
If @Biomancer 's suggestion of ddrescue does not work, you could try the manual way of counting the sectors, mounting the partitions, and grabbing the data, but this would get tedious pretty quickly.
You can use dd ( its a tool on all Linux systems ) to clone the drive. Then read it’s contents when you get it to safety. We can help with this if you are curious. I have various tools/methods for data recovery.
How did you go getting your data back?
for drives i can see but can’t read from in windows this is my first port of call http://www.r-studio.com/
if that’s not an option or can’t read the disc or it’s not readable in windows then try this bootable linux distribution. http://www.deftlinux.net/about/
I’ve got Mint 18.2 on CD that I tried, it could see the drive so I tried creating an image of it but it said the target disk was full even though it was 500GB with only less than a gig used. I’ll try another and see if that works.
It did say the disk was okay with a bad sector.
I booted from the CD and apparently managed to install gddrescue (in the install packages section) but I couldn’t find it to run it. I’m assuming I have to install the whole OS to be able to install other packages.
Thanks. Do I have to install Linux properly to be able to run ddrescue (can’t just run it from CD)?
I have other 500GB drives I can use but I think I used about 500+GB on the 2TB. I was hoping I could just choose seperate files/folders as I’ll need another 2TB drive to make a clone won’t I?
Your drive might be hosed. But if you can get it to work for a while, ddrescue is your friend. Have another drive at least as big ready as a target for the dump.
Tried the drive in another PC running Mint 18.2 (installed) but doesn’t see the drive.
I installed gddrescue but can’t find it in the menu or anywhere. Apparently it’s in usr/bin/ddrescue, I found a file but it just wants to open with another application and ddrescue / gddrescue is not listed.