Hard Drive problem

QueBert

Lifer
Jan 6, 2002
22,983
1,179
126
1TB WD Black, was having problems in OSX (Hackintosh) so I rebooted, when my boot loader came up I got some sort of disk read error. There was no clicking, so I popped in my boot cd and attempted to run a HD scanning program on it. When I selected it it took a second and said the drive wasn't ready. I rebooted and tried a different SATA cable and power cable. Same thing. I also noticed it took longer to get to the boot cd menu, it would sit there and think for about 10 seconds before it did anything. I unplugged the power and the boot cd started up right away. Obviously there's something wrong with the HD, I did put my hand on it when I turned on my computer and it's definitely spinning up so it's not dead motor. Still under warranty but I'm trying to figure out if there's any way I can get my data off it before I send it back. I can't come up with anything but maybe somebody here can.
 

mpilchfamily

Diamond Member
Jun 11, 2007
3,559
1
0
Is the data worth at least $90 to you? This is why you need to maintain current backups. But if it is worth about $90 to you then you can buy a copy of SpinRite and that should be able to fix the issue.
http://www.grc.com/intro.htm
 

QueBert

Lifer
Jan 6, 2002
22,983
1,179
126
Is the data worth at least $90 to you? This is why you need to maintain current backups. But if it is worth about $90 to you then you can buy a copy of SpinRite and that should be able to fix the issue.
http://www.grc.com/intro.htm

I own Spinrite it use it for clients computers for data recovery all the time, the problem here is the drive's being detected in the bios and I can feel the heads spinning, but I cannot access it. My PC takes a extra 10 or so seconds when it hits the BIOS screen to do anything, and when the screen before the bootloader comes up, it takes way longer than normal to actually get to the boot menu. I'd has dozens of HD's go down on me over the years. But never had one that did it like this.
 

RebateMonger

Elite Member
Dec 24, 2005
11,586
0
0
I've seen several disks that are recognized in the BIOS and the motor is spinning, but access to the disk is non-existent or intermittent. There's likely not much you can do.

You can try hooking it to another PC or enclosure to see if any of those can get to it. If you've given up, you can try reading the disk while it's in a freezer, using long data cables.
 
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