Failed? Failing? 2TB USB HD -- What to do now???

[Muse]

There's at least 300GB on this thing I'd like to save. I have a handful of other 2TB and 3TB external USB HD's that are AFAIK OK. This one is the one I've been steadily using to write/read data off my HDTV card in my desktop. Thus, that machine is effectively my HTPC, well, TV. I timeshift TV shows. Usually I just watch once and delete, but there are maybe a dozen recordings that I've either never watched (and want to), or I want to rewatch at some point.

There's some other data on the machine I'd like to save, such as images of other machines. I may have some of those elsewhere, but don't know that for a fact. Total data I want to save may not be much more than 300GB.

So, yesterday I get persistent messages from Windows that the writes were failing. I saw the drive letter in Windows Explorer but Crystaldiskinfo, Western Digital Lifeguard Diagnostics (it's a WD ELEMENTS 2TB USB HD, it's out of warranty, they warrant them for only one year), and Disk Administration didn't even see the drive, it wasn't even connected to the machine, if you believe what I was seeing in those programs/utilities.

I moved the HD to another machine (this one, a laptop running Windows 7, the desktop is running XP, its mobo won't run 7!), and the drive was seen but Windows wanted to scan it for errors and I let it, asking it to fix it. After a while Windows reported that it couldn't fix the drive. I then ran Western Digital Lifeguard Diagnostics' Extended Test. It seemed to be doing OK after ~24 hours and was reporting that it had another ~6 hours to go (to finish around 2AM). So, I go to bed and this morning it's message was this:

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DLGDIAG for Windows
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X Too many bad sectors detected.



[ OK ]

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I clicked OK and it showed that the extended test had terminated before completion.

Now, in Windows Explorer on this machine I see the HD, I see its content. I see the folders that contain the data I'd like to save if possible. I'm wondering just what my best strategy is at this point. Should I just connect another big HD to the machine and do copy/paste operations? Or is there a better/safer way to try to save the data? I have another WD hard drive, similar to this one, that had a similar problem, but I don't think I could even see the data and people said I could try to save data on it by using a Linux CD and run a utility on it, but I haven't gotten around to doing that.

In the future (I hope!) I will back up stuff like this. Thanks for help!

 

[Puffnstuff]

You should get the drive health utility from each of the drive manufacturers and test them to know for sure what their status is. When you run the utilities the drives should all be connected to the primary controller so the software can see them. If you have a 3rd party controller such as a marvell they will not see the drive.

Prior to attempting the move the data run chkdsk /f and see if it can repair it enough for you save the data. You should really consider buying a new inexpensive hd to move your data to if you don't have a dual layer bd to save it to. You might also consider an external hd to back up your files to and they're fairly cheap right now as well. I keep data on multiple hard drives and optical discs just to be sure. I've stopped cloning the boot drive as when they fail I just do a clean install and start over eliminating any problems.

 

[Elixer]

... and the drive was seen but Windows wanted to scan it for errors and I let it, asking it to fix it. After a while Windows reported that it couldn't fix the drive....

This was your first mistake.
What should be done in situations like this is to clone the HD over to a HD of the same size or bigger.
Usually, you would use something like ddrescue on it, since it has bad blocks.
Then try to recover your data on the new HD.

However, since you let windows mess with the HD, there is a good chance that pretty much all of the data it tried to "repair" is hosed.
You might be able to get fragments back, but, not sure it is worth the trouble.
The process is still the same though, you clone over the data to another HD, and then try recovery utilities on it, and get back as much as you can.
Using testdisk and or photorec might help.

Good luck.
Oh, and I think it might be too late for Pros to recover the data as well, since windows tried to fix it.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

It seemed we were discussing a parallel issue in another thread: using a USB (2 or 3) drive for extended 24/7 usage. I'm not sure that's what the OP was doing, but he says he was making DVR captures to the drive, so I'd think there'd be a tendency to leave it running more times than not.

Also, it's not clear to me that his video-recordings from the "HDTV card" came from OTA broadcasts or cable, or if cable -- from un-encrypted versus encrypted channels.

I would just hope he can rescue some -- if not all of his files.

At least it's not financial, tax or document-archive data. Or is it?

 

[Muse]

This was your first mistake.
What should be done in situations like this is to clone the HD over to a HD of the same size or bigger.
Usually, you would use something like ddrescue on it, since it has bad blocks.
Then try to recover your data on the new HD.

However, since you let windows mess with the HD, there is a good chance that pretty much all of the data it tried to "repair" is hosed.
You might be able to get fragments back, but, not sure it is worth the trouble.
The process is still the same though, you clone over the data to another HD, and then try recovery utilities on it, and get back as much as you can.
Using testdisk and or photorec might help.

Good luck.
Oh, and I think it might be too late for Pros to recover the data as well, since windows tried to fix it.

I have often wondered if Windows was my enemy, now I know it is. Sigh...

Well, this might not be smart but I'm starting by copying a folder and pasting it from the bad drive to a good one. It's got 64GB of data in it. Will see if it's usable. Hopefully, a lot of the data is "intact."

 

[Muse]

It seemed we were discussing a parallel issue in another thread: using a USB (2 or 3) drive for extended 24/7 usage. I'm not sure that's what the OP was doing, but he says he was making DVR captures to the drive, so I'd think there'd be a tendency to leave it running more times than not.

Also, it's not clear to me that his video-recordings from the "HDTV card" came from OTA broadcasts or cable, or if cable -- from un-encrypted versus encrypted channels.

I would just hope he can rescue some -- if not all of his files.

At least it's not financial, tax or document-archive data. Or is it?

Absolutely no critical data involved! My tax data (probably not critical because the IRS is very unlikely to go after me) resides in several places including my RAID1 two-3TB NAS.

This drive was not on all the time, when not used the machine is put into suspend. The only time it's on when I am not sitting at the machine is when it's recording. Well, it's plugged into its power supply continuously, but the machine that it's plugged into via USB is usually in suspend. I assume that in this state it's spun down and idle.

I'd say I record on the average of 6 hours of video a week. I probably do no more than 2 hours of work on the machine a week in addition, and of course, for every hour of time recording there's an hour of playback except for the relatively rare event where I don't watch it right away. There's only a few of those. Actually, a lot of those hours overlap in that I am watching the beginning of a recording while the machine continues to record the latter portion (i.e. time shifting, which the HDTV card's software supports). I'd do this stuff internally with an internal HD except for the fact that the mobo is ancient, it's SATA controller is crappy, and it would never run a 2TB HD anyway. I need a new mobo, etc.!

All the info that I super cherish is backed up all over the place. It's just, for the most part, if not totally, this DVR stuff, that I didn't have the wisdom to backup. I'll try to change my ways there. I figure if it's worth hanging onto, it's worth backing up. Never trust a HD. You know, I went for many years without losing any HD data. It's these WD ELEMENTS 2TB USB HD's that have been kicking my ass. I've lost around 3 of them now, I think. 😱😵:'(D:🙄

The DRV recordings are of OTA (off my antennas), no cable involved, so no encryption.

The folder I'm trying to copy now is of the 2015 Super Bowl, a great game. I want to rewatch it. I have around 10 other recordings I hope I can retrieve. There are a few images of other machine's boot drives, I probably have those elsewhere, I haven't determined exactly what's going on with that. I should keep better records!

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Lost three of those external drives? Something wrong there!

I can literally count on one hand the drives I've lost in . . . lemme see . . 29 years. A 20 MB Western Digital. A 2GB Seagate SCSI. Mmm. . . Ah! recently, a 600GB VelociRaptor, and before that a 160 GB Seagate IDE drive.

How old can a motherboard be, to be unable to use a 2 TB HDD? You don't have to cable an SATA-III HDD to an SATA-III port, and I'd think any loss in performance on an SATA-II port is almost insignificant.

2TB is the limit acceptable to using MBR partitions. I have 4x Seagate NAS 2TB drives in my server, configured only as AHCI, with a virtual 8GB Stablebit "DrivePool" volume. That's been running 24/7 for over a year. StableBit Scanner reports "totally healthy," and I re-run a disk-by-disk scan every month or so.

The server motherboard is an old 680i (nForce) board released in 2006. I just turned off the non-AHCI-complaint nForce controller, put two 4-port Marvell-based controllers in the PCI_E slots. There's a performance hit for the PCI_E slots being version 1.x. I periodically archive DVR captures from my workstation to the server. Works for me!

 

[Muse]

I can archive DVR captures to my NAS, but the MyHD 130 HDTV card doesn't support playing off a network, so it would only be useful to restore something that got corrupted, or the event where I deleted something I later want. Therefore, what backing up I have done with my DVR recordings has been to another large USB external HD, not my NAS. I have done a little of that, but unfortunately have not been in the habit of it. I think I should make a habit of it going forward.

The machine with the HDTV card has a Gigabyte GA-K8n Pro motherboard (specs) with a Silicon Image siI3512 SATA controller with two internal ports. That controller is early and, I was told, notoriously undependable. I don't believe there's any way it would run a 2TB internal drive. I'd be surprised if it will run anything over 500GB, actually. I do have one 500GB drive in it (Samsung H501LJ internal 500 GB SATA) and when I ran the HDTV card onto that drive I had problems, serious issues, so I've run on those WD Elements 2TB drives ever since. I assume the issues were due to the lousy controller. However, nowadays crystaldiskinfo throws a caution on the drive, even more reason not to trust it.

What could have caused my 3 WD Elements USB HD failures (at least 3, I may have lost count!)? I can't begin to guess, other than bad design. The drives are passively cooled, they have no fans, they don't even have any ventilation. I've thought of drilling ~1/2" holes like Swiss cheese in the cases, maybe I should. That may extend their life. The darn things came with only a 1 year warranty. I bought three 3TB Seagate USB HD's at Costco with have a 2 year warranty, I think still active. So far, no trouble with them but they are very lightly used. In fact, I only opened the last package yesterday! Bought the three drives May 20, 2015, so there's more than a year left on the warranty. I suppose I may get extended warranty coverage by virtue of the credit card, don't know if that would work. It was bought with Costco's American Express card. I've never taken advantage of extended coverage, I should have probably with the failed WD ELEMENTS drives, it never occurred to me.

I did succeed (apparently) in copying the folder with the recording I made of the 2015 Super Bowl. I haven't tried playing it yet. There's around another 10 folders that I'd like to save.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I can archive DVR captures to my NAS, but the MyHD 130 HDTV card doesn't support playing off a network, so it would only be useful to restore something that got corrupted, or the event where I deleted something I later want.

The machine with the HDTV card has a Gigabyte GA-K8n Pro motherboard (specs) with a Silicon Image siI3512 SATA controller with two internal ports. That controller is early and, I was told, notoriously undependable. I don't believe there's any way it would run a 2TB internal drive. I'd be surprised if it will run anything over 500GB, actually. I do have one 500GB drive in it (Samsung H501LJ internal 500 GB SATA) and when I ran the HDTV card onto that drive I had problems, serious issues, so I've run on those WD Elements 2TB drives ever since. I assume the issues were due to the lousy controller. However, nowadays crystaldiskinfo throws a caution on the drive, even more reason not to trust it.

What could have caused my 3 WD Elements USB HD failures (at least 3, I may have lost count!)? I can't begin to guess, other than bad design. The drives are passively cooled, they have no fans, they don't even have any ventilation. I've thought of drilling ~1/2" holes like Swiss cheese in the cases, maybe I should. That may extend their life.

Anyway, OTA broadcasts wouldn't have limited your playback options: you might have burned them to optical disks to play anywhere you'd want, on any machine you want. I can move encrypted DVR captures to my server, but playback can only occur on the machine which recorded them, even as they're stored on the server.

That motherboard's an oldie, though. No doubt . . .

 

[Muse]

That motherboard's an oldie, though. No doubt . . .

I should order a new mobo today. Have to decide what one, a serious issue. I'm going to post in the motherboards or general hardware forum trying to develop my upgrade plan. The box needs to support my current HDTV card (I'd hope!!!), hopefully won't be obsolete too soon. I've been meaning to do this for years. I've been limping along with what I have, because it works. Well, I can make it work. I live with shortcomings, the occasional crash, the unreliability of those external drives. Priorities, priorities... :|

 

[Data-Medics]

Just for future reference, chkdisk is the last thing you should run on any hard drive which is having hardware issues like you describe. The first line of business anytime a drive is failing and you need data from it, is to attempt to clone it using software such as ddrescue in Linux.

Then after you have a copy of the data, you can try a program like chkdisk to see if you can "repair" the drive. I've seen far too many cases where what would have been an easy recovery became a catastrophic nightmare due to programs like chkdisk, spinrite, hdd regenerator, etc.

 

[Puffnstuff]

To be honest, when I've had to extract data from a failing hd in the past I've always put it into a powered usb cradle and was able to get everything off it I wanted. I'm not sure what it was, maybe it was the upright orientation of the hd, because the cradle supplies the same power to the drive as it would receive otherwise.

 

[Cerb]

I should order a new mobo today. Have to decide what one, a serious issue. I'm going to post in the motherboards or general hardware forum trying to develop my upgrade plan. The box needs to support my current HDTV card (I'd hope!!!), hopefully won't be obsolete too soon. I've been meaning to do this for years. I've been limping along with what I have, because it works. Well, I can make it work. I live with shortcomings, the occasional crash, the unreliability of those external drives. Priorities, priorities... :|

Not so random starting point: ASRock H97M Pro4.