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My hard drive suddenly crashed today. I run SMART monitoring software, but there was no warning. I wouldn't be so worried about it if my backup wasn't five-days old (my backup software is supposed to run every hour, but apparently it wasn't...).

Sometimes, my computer gives me the error "2100:Detection Error on HDD0 (Main HDD)". Other times, it's able to get a little further but fails to find a bootable partition. I dual boot Windows and Ubuntu; it never boots Windows, sometimes it's able to boot Ubuntu, but irrecoverably hangs out after a minute or two.

Similar story when I connect it to a USB SATA adapter. Sometimes, it will mount, but it will suddenly become inaccessible and dismount after a minute.

Is there anything I can do for data retrieval at this point or do I need to take it to a specialist if I really need the data?

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Could be bad sectors or a controller issue. For ("against") the bad sectors, get yourself a copy of Spinrite and run at level 4. If it takes three weeks to run - let it ;-). It tries to statistically recover data from the damaged sectors by adjusting the drive heads. It even has a money back guarantee.

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  • Because it works. No I have no affiliation. Frankly I'm surprised that not so many people know it. And your 'lots of times' is 3, maybe 4.
    – Jan Doggen
    Mar 22, 2013 at 7:37
  • If it's an SSD, SpinRite has some but limited effect. SpinRite is also extremely dangerous to run on drives that have failed in a way that causes more damage to be done by continued drive activity (e.g. flaked magnetic coating on a mechanical drive). SpinRite is also of limited usefulness on severely damaged drives, as it simply writes the data back to the failing drive and is unable to do anything if the drive has reached its reallocation limit already (it only supports software based reallocation for FAT, not NTFS or ext; at least according to an email response from Greg).
    – Jason C
    Jul 4, 2014 at 0:56

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