A friend of mine had an external Seagate hard drive that the power cord broke. He shucked the drive and tossed the case. He cannot read the drive and I found a result suggesting that Seagate formats in 4k so he won’t be able to access the data without an HBA capable of reading a single drive in 4k. I prefer options that do not involve downloading firmware from a third party source. I already have a Perc H710, but the original firmware does not support 4k apparently and would require firmware. I would also have to ship it to him and have him ship it back.
Oh - and if it works with Windows 10 - it would make things a lot easier because trying to walk my friend thru doing stuff with Linux wouldn’t work out well.
What has he already tried connecting it to, and what exactly does “cannot read the drive” mean?
4Kn has been around for a while, and any generic SATA controller from the last decade would be able to handle it with Windows 10. This is unlikely to be the problem.
It’s more likely the external controller was doing remapping which changed the way the partition tables are recorded on the drive. That scenario would require a software approach such as this, not a hardware one. The other option is getting a replacement of that same external chassis and putting the drive in it.
But all of this depends on knowing the actual problem first. Also note if the data is genuinely important, the safest thing to do is give it to a professional recovery service, not proceed with either of these guess-based approaches — especially remotely.
This is how it shows up. I actually thought of and suggested to just buy another of the same drive off ebay to shuck, clean the drive and re-initialize/format it, use the controller to read the data off his drive and write to the replacement one and now he gets a bonus 3tb of storage.
To provide more information, he is running a Z170 motherboard but is using a USB SATA adapter. The drive worked prior to the power cord defect.
I cannot post links, this is the amazon product number of the adapter. B00MYU0EAU
Can now: https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-Cable-Adapter-Converter-Support/dp/B00MYU0EAU
Sorry about the delay, been an amazingly busy time of year for me.
That looks exactly like sector remapping done by the Seagate chassis controller - the drive has 512 byte sectors, but the original controller lied and presented every chunk of 8 as a single 4K sector, so the stored data structures have the wrong math. (The partition table is in number of sectors, not physical size.)
Safest thing to do is get that same model of chassis again. The software approach I linked should work, but it’s risky as it’s altering data on the drive, so if it goes wrong it could lead to complete loss.
Other theoretical approaches:
- perhaps someone maintains a list of USB adapters that do remapping somewhere, so there’d be more options for hardware
- perhaps someone has a software filter, possibly involving a VM or similar, to do the translation long enough to access the data
…but I don’t know of any offhand.
An HBA won’t help here though, as the drive itself is being accessed just fine — it’s the data that’s incorrect.
I was thinking my final approach would be to buy an identical working drive, forensic clone the original to the identical working external drive and with any luck presto bango data readable off the new external drive and bonus 3TB internal after a clean.
Although I would suggest to my friend to shuck the external drive and put it in a third party external case that doesn’t do this junk if he wanted to keep using one externally.
Do you have a handy 4TB available space around? You can make a mirror image of the raw drive data using DD from a bootable linux environment, so that you’re not overwriting the drive it’s self, at least. Or, if you do overwrite the drive, you at least have a backup of the raw data.
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One that note, maybe clonezilla is an option.
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