Hot answers tagged hard-drive-recovery
7
Call a professional data recovery company and follow their instructions exactly. The more you mess with it, the more likely it becomes that you will damage any remaining data. This is not something an amateur can do.
Also, check with your insurance company to see if the data recovery will be covered.
5
First, lots of Seagate 7200.11 drives were affected by a firmware problem, which results in drive being inaccessible. This specific problem can be solved by a firmware flash, which can be done using a special cable & adapter, but it is not for the faint of heart. If you have this specific problem, you might try fixing it yourself, or maybe RMA disk to ...
4
Sounds like you've been bitten by the BSY bug (the drive event log location has been set to an invalid location by an off by one error in the firmware). This contains a reference to your model being affected. At one time, you could send the drive into Seagate and they'd revive it by updating the firmware, you'd end up paying only for shipping. Hopefully ...
3
I haven't done this in several years, but it used to just be finding the same model # and swapping the PCBs. It was a great trick for recovering data for users when doing hardware support. I imagine you could run into issues if the FW/PN change modified motor manipulation with respect to the platters or using different internals, but I bet that is the edge ...
3
I know sounds bizarre, but apparently placing the drive in a freezer and cooling it down (sometimes) fixes it for long enough to pull the data off it, until it warms up at least.
Consider this a last resort
might work if it's a platter related issue, not if its a faulty component
Seal the drive well enough to avoid moisture getting inside
grab some ...
3
Sometimes dead drives will still show up as the devices, since the connectors are still fine and the board is still fine, but one of the other physical components is broken. You could try placing the platters in another disk or paying for professional recovery, but these are probably both overkill. What was on the drive if you don't mind me asking?
3
Viewing the MBR, even editing it, is a very cool idea.. I don't know how you'd go about that. I may have viewed a HDD MBR before with Roadkil's sector editor but I didn't do anything with it. And I don't know of documentation on it. If somebody provides that and knows what they're talking about then that's impressive!
But if you want to fix it like a mere ...
3
Actually, if the chip is hot enough for you to say it’s “hot”, and not just “warm” when you touch it, and if the platter is not even spinning, then (for all intents and purposes) it is indeed most likely dead. Maybe the circuit board has short-circuited or burned out or something, and now the platters won’t spin; that would also explain why the system cannot ...
3
I just got this figured out. Under Recovery Options, select Command Prompt. Type DISKPART and press Enter. Type LIST DISK to make sure the disk is available, then select it. Type LIST PARTITION or LIST VOLUME to make sure there aren't any volumes/partitions on the drive. If there are, SELECT PARTITION # and press Enter, DELETE PARTITION/VOLUME, Enter. Then ...
3
It's worth noting that this could be a problem with the computer itself, or the cable you're using, or even the power connection. Try swapping all those things around and see if you can get this to work on another system with differing configuration.
If it's not detected at all after all that, there's almost certainly something wrong with the controller ...
2
Can replacing the circuit board will help me recover my data?
No, that circuit board has hard drive specific infrmation, changing it is worth trying but rarely works.
A better bet is to try to solder two new components on it, but the problem is that you don't have an idea which exact components you are looking at. You could try to measure the ones ...
2
Yes and no.
Assuming only the PCB got damaged:
Get an identical PCB with the same firmware and it might work.
If it damaged more, e.g. sent a power spike through the RW heads, then your chances go way down.
Preferred solutions (in order) are:
Throw drive away. Restore data from backup (to a new drive).
Check disk recovery services. They are really ...
2
Connecting the drive via a 2.5 inch laptop IDE to regular IDE should work fine. An external USB casing for IDE/PATA will also work. However, Windows will not recognise the contents of the drive without extra software. But you will be able to make a backup of the drive via dd or its Windows equivalent.
According to Use WinUAE to access Amiga HDD, WinUAE ...
2
If you can connect that hard drive internally (take it out of it's case and connect to a SATA/PATA header) it might be able to detect errors and correct them. It will certainly do it faster than any USB connection might allow.
And assuming there's no virus, what it sounds like is that his system or even yours may be trying to defrag that hard drive whenever ...
2
There are bad sectors at the beginning of the disk, where partition table should be located. And it seems that your attempt to remap them was unsuccessful.
I usually remap bad sectors with MHDD; it's a freeware utility running in DOS, so it can bypass OS cache and work directly with disk controller. Check SMART monitoring data to make sure there are no ...
2
Spin retry count is a measure of how your drive is doing coming up to speed. Increased count shows that something in the subsystem is not allowing the spindle motor to come up to speed in the allotted time.
You have something that is affecting both drives in coming up to speed. Which immediately makes me think of things that two drives would have in common, ...
2
It almost sounds to me like logical block addressing (LBA) isn't working. Back in the late Pentium era, 8GB was the limit for disk size unless the disk and BIOS supported LBA or INT 13H. I suppose if the controller is damaged the disk might failsafe to CHS mode still. Sectors are still 512 bytes, after all (unless you've got a very new drive using ...
2
The enclosure was there to abstract away a common problem among 3TB drives
Without formatting to a GPT, the current partition table and thus the max size of a partition is limited to ~ 2TB (assuming 512 sectors).
Formatting as a GPT allows a single 3TB partition (called volumes in GPT speak).
Drives formatted as GPT must be initialized however before they ...
2
My understanding is that the answer is "no". The hard disk controller is more than just a controller, it keeps track of SMART, bad sectors, and other stuff that I couldn't get a hardware recovery company to reveal ("that is our IP").
So putting another PCB on a drive only works in a small percentage of cases - and that is even if you can get hold of the ...
2
You restore important data from backups.
The problem with "Ten Things To Do To Secure An Important Persons Computer" is that it forgets the usual definition of Information Security:
protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information
2
Try using dd_rescue. It works essentially the same way that dd does but if it encounters bad sectors it will skip over them and continue the cloning process. Assuming there aren't many bad sectors you should be able to get the majority of your data off the drive.
As I'm sure you're aware, be careful when you use dd_rescue. It can destroy your data if ...
1
Your best bet is to run something like TestDisk to inspect whether there is still actual data around, from there you can attempt to get the partition to see its MBR back. This assumes no bits were overwritten and that only the partition information was affected.
If however the actual partition data has been corrupted as well, there is nothing you can do...
1
This sounds a lot like you have a damaged hard drive, which is probably what caused the corruption in the first place. When a program tries to read a bad sector on a disk, it will fail, causing the disk to attempt to read it again. If the application is not designed to time out the reads and move on, they can get stuck forever.
Because very few programs, ...
1
If the drive behaves weird, check it's S.M.A.R.T. status with a tool like GSmartControl. Do not attempt to write to the disk (e.g. by letting chkdsk reapair file system errors) until you know it is healthy.
Depending on the worth of your files, do a sector based backup immediately. I recommend using ddrescue as it is designed to handle read errors as good ...
1
Bitlocker works either using a TPM chip and/or a USB key. Now there are three methods of Recovery incase of a disaster.
Recovery password
Recovery key file
Data Recovery Agent
The last one is by far the best method if you are part of Active Directory. It's pretty automatic. The second one is the best method for all other cases IMO.
In the case of ...
1
So the answer appears to be either "No", or at least "Not in the way I tried". The resulting volume mounted once, but Disk Utility's "Repair Disk" said the filesystem structures had errors (incorrect b-tree sizes, perhaps?) that Disk Utility couldn't repair. I didn't have the ability to see if Disk Warrior or another tool could have fixed it. The failing ...
1
Unfortunately, what I wanted to do is not possible (NTFS does not store a CRC, the hard drive does).
However, I recommend SpinRite, as it is in the process of recovering a hard drive (with a painfully slow speed of some GBs per day, occasionaly I mount the filesystem to see how's the state of the files).
It may or may not work for you, so if the data is ...
1
As was pointed out, if a known good hard drive doesn't work with the same adapter, then you can safely assume the hard drive has completely kicked the bucket. Unfortunately, taking it to a store at this point will most likely result in you paying a diagnostic fee, but not getting any data recovered. Why? Because at this point a shop will be attempting ...
1
Nope, it is not usual.
If it is a problem that can be solved by swapping parts over from one drive to another, you will only need that one part in order to make the faulty drive work (providing the donor drive was in perfect working order).
If the error is with a controller board, spindle or motor, how will having two spares work?
It sounds to me like ...
1
My Seagate external drive started failing two weeks ago. It got very warm, so I unplugged it and let it cool, and it would work fine again for a couple of days. Eventually I began to hear clicking and knew mechanical failure was near. I managed to archive what I needed most from it before it completely quit and refused to be recognized.
I'd heard about ...
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