Other Help to recover a failed HDD!!!!

[OCD Solutions]

Alright guru's, I need help before I make a big mistake and lose everything.

I have a 2TB Seagate NAS drive that I use to hold all my digital movies and music. The music I have backed up but the movies are way too big to have backed up anywhere else. I came home a couple nights ago and discovered that the drive is faulted and I can't access any of the 450+ movies I had stored.

I have already downloaded the seagate analysis software and it confirms that there is an issue but it hasn't been able to fix it. All the next steps seem to want me to format the drive but I am holding out hope that there is a way to repair it still.

I currently have the drive powered up and connected to my computer with a USB cable. It spins up just fine and my PC assigns it a drive letter. It even shows in device manager. It's like it lost the sector with the "contents list" and just doesn't know what is on the disk.

Any ideas?

 

[SJ 701X]

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/tips/4294038

You are also able to recover old, deleted files on your hard drive. I can go back on mine and find all the files that I have deleted, even after multiple formats. You will probably need to buy some software (or get it some other way) to recover the files on your harddrive. Now the real question is, do you have space on another good harddrive to store these movies?

And unless you have a super fast sataIII drive and hook it up with a sata cable expect for it to take over a week to recover, seeing as it is a 2tb drive, maybe even longer.

 

[MADMAT]

Dude I don't even know where to start.....not easy to explain....it might take every method in the book and it will take a LOT of time to get 450+ movies!!

Mistakes made so far: Using a seagate for important data, not having 450+ movies on 2 drives!!

 

[SJ 701X]

Dude I don't even know where to start.....not easy to explain....it might take every method in the book and it will take a LOT of time to get 450+ movies!!

Mistakes made so far: Using a seagate for important data, not having 450+ movies on 2 drives!!

Seagates are fine, I run them in every computer I have, and haven't had any issues with them. Your best bet is to make redundancy copies if you have a RAID capable system as well as having something installed like disk defraggler or crystal disk info that tells you the health of your hard drive. Also, make sure that you keep your files on a drive different than your C: drive. It spreads the wear out on the drives and allows your computer to run faster.

 

[OCD Solutions]

Lol, I actually read that article yesterday and it's one of the reasons I am at the stage I'm at now. I have used recovery software years ago to recover deleted files and the data was so corrupted that it was almost useless. It was my entire music collection (18GB) and most of the songs were mutilated. Thankfully I discovered 4 DVD's that I had made when I reloaded my PC and I recovered 16GB of it.

I have another drive ready, just not sure how much I want to invest in software to recover movies, only to discover that it's jumbled and useless afterwards.

P.S. Ths NAS drive is my backup. I have hard copies of every movie as well but it will take months to redigitize the collection, not to mention the time to convert them to ipad compatable formats. It took almost 2 weeks with 3 PC's running around the clock to convert 120 of our movies to ipad format.

This NAS drive sits on my network and is seperate from all other drives. My desktops all have 40GB main drives with a second 250GB data drive. My laptops are backed up to a partition on the NAS drive as well.

We have several NAS units at work ranging from $1500 units to full blown $50K units for corporate data. Hopefully I can snag one of the old ones next week and upgrade our home storage.

 

[Magnum Mike]

Do you have linux skills?

ddrescue is my favorite tool for data recovery. Here is an article showing how to clone as much as possible one drive to another of the same size or larger:

http://techmuck.blogspot.com/2012/03/data-recovery-with-gnu-ddrescue.html

I tend to clone smaller drives to image files instead of other drives, but you would need a drive bigger than 2 TB to hold the 2 TB image file of the disk (the clone grabs empty space too.) http://www.trinityhome.org/Home/?wpid=59&front_id=12

I agree that the recovery process will take a very very long time.

Good luck.

 

[MADMAT]

If I had it here the first thing I would do is remove it from its enclosure (external drive, right?) and put in a PC and see what happens. If nothing diff then I would switch the jumper on the drive to limit the drive to only 1.5GB per second (it should have this ability)....then fire up the PC again and look again.....nothing diff then I would format the drive one time and use my data recovery software to scan the drive (takes FOREVER!!!! Probably 15 hours+ for something like that). If it finds the files you want then you can select them and copy paste them to another drive. If this works your data should not be corrupt at all....I have never seen that...it might have been the old software you used back in the day......new stuff better maybe?

The next thing I would try is my stand alone cloning dock ....put 2 drives in and push a button.....takes forever too!!

If it doesn't see the files then we have to open up the drive and do things the hard way!

 

[OCD Solutions]

It's already pulled from the external case so I could attach my USB adapter cable. The next problem is that my desktop is so old, it's IDE and not SATA so I couldn't attach it even if i wanted to. My dell Precision 6300 laptop is SATA but I don't know how you would attach an external drive other than the USB that I am already using.?.?.?

So if my next step is to format then that is what I must do, just didn't want to do it before I exhausted all other options.

What do you reccomend for recovery software?

P.S. I used Kroll On Track to recover a drive for work and it was $1400 for an 80GB drive and the data was fully intact.

 

[Magnum Mike]

.........then I would format the drive one time........

I would never do that to an original failing drive that is trying to be recovered. Maybe to a clone of a clone as an experiment, but never to the original uncloned data on the original HW.

Another option is to put the drive in a PC and boot on a Knoppix CD. I have seen many cases of Microsoft Windows not recognizing a corrupt FAT32 or NTFS file-system and that same file-system be recognized by Knoppix. There is nothing special about the Linux on the Knoppix CD, Knoppix just makes sharing the files from the local drives easy with Windows computers on the same network.

Hmm... Since it was in a NAS, do you know what file-system was being used on the failing drive?

 

[MADMAT]

It has worked for me dozens of times (quick format then run recover software) but I would not do it to a drive that was mechanically failing....only drive acting like this one......it has never let me down...

I use http://www.recovermyfiles.com/

 

[MADMAT]

Did you see a jumper? That switching down to 1.5GB per second has saved me a few times.....

 

[OCD Solutions]

It has the posts but no jumper, have to rob one from another old HD, figure out the pin config and try it out.

Downloading RecoverMyFiles now to see what it can see. If it can see my files then I guess I'll pop the $70 for a license. My time is worth a lot more than that so it will be more than worth it if it works.

 

[MADMAT]

Yea hopefully the pin config is on a sticker on the drive.....it should say something like "no jumper needed for master/slave" and "limit to 1.5GB"...

 

[OCD Solutions]

no label on the case which is odd and just fumbled thru a couple forum posts stating that this model does does require jumpers.?.?.?

It's a barracuda 2000GB (Green) ST2000DL003

The software is not recognizing it yet either which could be a bad sign but I powered it off for a couple seconds and it usually takes my PC a couple minutes before it assigns a drive letter so I'm going ot sit back awhile and let it simmer. Going to be a lazy day anyways so there's no need to rush it now.

EDIT: found the jumper config, now can't find a jumper to insert. :banghead:

 

[MADMAT]

Yea sata drives don't need jumpers...but they left some pins on for some options....

This isn't looking good IMO.....

 

[OCD Solutions]

It's got a drive letter and recovermyfiles is working on it now. Looking for lost partitions... :fingersx:

 

[OCD Solutions]

So far it's found 2 partitions so things are looking promising. It hasn't gotten to the 3rd partition with all the movies yet and judging from the speed, it won't for several hours yet. I guess I'll leave it alone for the day and hope this has a happy ending. :biggrin:

 

[SJ 701X]

Did you read the popular mechanics article? It tells you what to do. No need to format. You can't attach sata to a laptop unless you have an esata enclosure.

 

[OCD Solutions]

Did you read the popular mechanics article? It tells you what to do. No need to format. You can't attach sata to a laptop unless you have an esata enclosure.

Yup, read the article a couple days ago as already stated. Followed every step that applied and still ended up here. I'm not sure what exactly you gleamed from it but I found it pretty basic and straightforward. Not exactly a complete step by step "how to recover". I did establish that it was a logical failure and not physical and have moved on to recovery software. I have not reformatted the drive so I should have pretty good chances.

Now go dye your mixed fuel with ATF. :biggrin:

 

[SJ 701X]

Yup, read the article a couple days ago as already stated. Followed every step that applied and still ended up here. I'm not sure what exactly you gleamed from it but I found it pretty basic and straightforward. Not exactly a complete step by step "how to recover". I did establish that it was a logical failure and not physical and have moved on to recovery software. I have not reformatted the drive so I should have pretty good chances.

Now go dye your mixed fuel with ATF. :biggrin:

Did you read the WHOLE thing? Just get the software and connect the drive. There should be no need to use the jumper to change the data transfer rate. If you could find a computer with a sata port it would greatly help with recovering the info in a speedy manner. Get defraggler (It's free) and connect your drive and see what it throws out for an error. It will be under the health tab when you select the drive. It is probably a bad sector.


And I have to go get some ATF so I don't grenade a motor