Hard Drive Woes

[slayernine]

Western Digital Green 1.5TB

Went skiing over the weekend came home to find that uTorrent on my download machine was locked up. Tried numerous times to end the process to no success. Tried restarting computer but it locked up at the shut-down screen (Win7 64bit) and after waiting 15min I just hit the reset button.

Since then the drive no longer detects hooked up via sata internally. I pulled out the drive and put it in my eSata connected toaster and after trying a few times I got it to spin up and detect.

Now in Windows it says it is not initialized and gives me an error when trying to initialize the drive. Tried a few recovery type programs but nothing even sees the drive.

Any ideas/thoughts on how to get anything off this drive? Even if I can get a list of the files that were on the drive it would be helpful to know what I'm missing. Thank you in advance.

 

[mikeymikec]

If I can't get a computer to detect a drive even though USB/eSATA (I tend to prefer USB when a drive is acting up, my machine has BSOD'd in the past when trying to read a dodgy drive over eSATA), as far as my skills are concerned it's game over.

Some people talk about swapping the PCB from an identical drive, I haven't tried that before. Given that after a few attempts it spin up, I think the issue is probably at least partly mechanical, so I wouldn't have thought a board swap would help.

I think it was probably a bad idea to try and initialise the drive. It may have made a change to the information about partition information on the drive and further scupper your chances of data recovery.

Sorry I can't help more.

 

[Gillbot]

google freezer trick and see if that helps

 

[slayernine]

lol @freezer trick, I think that only works if the platters are not reading properly. I'm pretty sure this is a controller related issue but I'm not sure. I'll resort to this if I get desperate

As for the USB suggestion, my toaster has a USB port as well but I was not able to get the hard drive to spin up or show up when using it. Perhaps I will try a strictly USB enclosure when I get home today.

I sure wish hard drives would get cheap again because I really would like to just blow a tonne of money on a secondary backup of absolutely everything. Right now I only have music, photos and documents backups up really well including offsite.

 

[Charlie98]

I sure wish hard drives would get cheap again because I really would like to just blow a tonne of money on a secondary backup of absolutely everything. Right now I only have music, photos and documents backups up really well including offsite.

...an metric tonne, or an American ton? :biggrin:

I'm right there with you, in fact, cloning my HDD on my old desktop as we speak, using a nice used HDD I found here in the FS/FT's. I'm scared to death of my old system crashing or the hardware dying and taking all my information with it.

...and in my new computer, I'm afraid of losing my information to new technology failures... read: SandForce SSD.

Let us know if you are ever able to get your HDD to spin up again...

 

[truckerCLOCK]

Have you tried Gparted or Partion Magic ? Do you have any other machines to test the drive in ? Is it recognized in BIOS ?

 

[amdhunter]

Have you tried Gparted or Partion Magic ? Do you have any other machines to test the drive in ? Is it recognized in BIOS ?

This x 100. Download GDBNT trial and see if it can access the drive. I've always had good luck with it. One of the best purchases you can get.

 

[Gillbot]

lol @freezer trick, I think that only works if the platters are not reading properly. I'm pretty sure this is a controller related issue but I'm not sure. I'll resort to this if I get desperate

As for the USB suggestion, my toaster has a USB port as well but I was not able to get the hard drive to spin up or show up when using it. Perhaps I will try a strictly USB enclosure when I get home today.

I sure wish hard drives would get cheap again because I really would like to just blow a tonne of money on a secondary backup of absolutely everything. Right now I only have music, photos and documents backups up really well including offsite.

I've had a few that wouldn't be recognized at all, used a USB to IDE/SATA adapter with the HDD in the freezer and was able to get them to recognize and pull the data off.

I think if there is a chip or ANYTHING overheating, the freezer trick can help. Plus, if the drive is dead now, what is it going to hurt to try it? If you are worried about moisture, seal it up in a ziplock bag.

 

[slayernine]

Well this weekend I gave it a solid effort and tried out some of the software mentioned in this threat as well as multiple computers and different adapters including sata, esata, usb and usb3. Still no luck mounting or initializing this drive.

So next up I think it is time to stick it in the freezer

Whether that works or not I'll be RMA'ing the drive, does anyone know with the current hard drive situation if they have drives to handle RMA's and if those drives are worse than usual?

 

[amdhunter]

Well this weekend I gave it a solid effort and tried out some of the software mentioned in this threat as well as multiple computers and different adapters including sata, esata, usb and usb3. Still no luck mounting or initializing this drive.

So next up I think it is time to stick it in the freezer

Whether that works or not I'll be RMA'ing the drive, does anyone know with the current hard drive situation if they have drives to handle RMA's and if those drives are worse than usual?

I did an RMA from WD a few weeks ago, and had no issues getting anything back. Turnaround was a bit long @ 3 weeks though.

I finally decided to RMA my dead drives and now have 5TB of drives lying around doing nothing. One 2TB Seagate External, One 1TB HP External, One 2TB Seagate Internal which is already showing issues. All of these arrived within 2 weeks.