4TB WD Black 3.5" HDD Dead or ??

[EXCellR8]

Had my larger hard drive crash on me over the weekend; I can no longer initialize the disk in Windows. The drive is no longer detected outside of specialized software and I get a general CRC error. I think the drive is toast, and I already have a replacement on the way, but what would be the best method to at least attempt data recovery? There's nothing on the drive I really need, just a matter of saving anything so I don't have to reinstall it all over the course of the next few weeks...

Windows can't assign the disk a letter so I can't really do a CHKDSK, so I'm running some data recovery software that is running a deep scan on the drive. It's been at it for over 14 hours now but nothing is coming up, yet. This hasn't happened to me in quite some time so I may not be familiar with some of the newer tools that are out there. Any guidance would be appreciated, thanks.

 

[ashetos]

I would try ddrescue (https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html). It's not a user friendly tool but it's very powerful, worth reading the manual to see if you're willing to put up with it. Of course, you'll need some sort of live USB linux distribution to run it.

 

[EXCellR8]

hmm, bookmarked that thanks. might not get into that for this drive in particular but could be pretty useful for future failures (not to be pessimistic lol) or something more sensitive

i'll give the current software several more hours to complete and then call it a day.

 

[EXCellR8]

bit of an update...

came home to about what I expected I guess... nearly 24 hours scanning and still zero files found on the drive, not a good sign. aborted the scan because the drive was pretty toasty and set it aside.

after letting the drive cool down for awhile I popped it back in the docking station to see if I could run one last surface test but, to my delight, both partitions suddenly popped up and all of the folders were visible. so, right now I'm just dumping what I can off of the drive because I don't plan on using it anymore but I don't understand why all of a sudden it just works fine. it also sounds a lot better than it did last night but I theorize that it will eventually just quit outright. just a bit odd that a long scan yielded no results but a simple power cycle with cool down prompted a (seemingly temporary) fix...

 

[Elixer]

Usually, on a failing HD, I also use ddrescue, and clone it onto a new HD, and *then* perform file recovery on that HD.

As for why it randomly works, it is all firmware related, and it somehow got further than the other times. At least you were lucky enough to grab stuff off it it. Most people aren't, and end up spending big $$$ to try and recover it with the pros.

 

[EXCellR8]

Usually, on a failing HD, I also use ddrescue, and clone it onto a new HD, and *then* perform file recovery on that HD.

that wasn't really an option up until last night though, when the drive decided to work again. if I was able to clone it I wouldn't have bothered with a file recovery anyway.

however now, I was basically able to salvage all of the data from the drive so I might run CHKDSK just to see what happens. I figured the drive could crap out at any moment so I just started moving data while I was able to do so. bizarre turn of events but I'll likely scrap the drive after this anyway; only a matter of time before I'm not so lucky.

 

[NoSoupforyou]

Bad batch of WD blacks? Put together a new system Dec03. WD Black 2T. Drive seen in disk management (win10 pro) as unallocated. Set it up in drive management and it was formatted and assigned a drive letter.

got to installing a game. Half way thru it seemed to stall. Was taking much longer than it should have. So i cancelled install. Went to look at drive and the drive letter was gone. Disk management saw the drive but it was unallocated space again. Got errors every time i tried to get it going. Looked in the bios and the drive did not show up

brought it back to store and got new one. This time a 1T Seagate Firecuda.