Hard Drive died... data recovery?

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nan desu
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Hard Drive died... data recovery?

Post by nan desu »

Aftter only 8 months, the WD 160GB hard disk I bought last Thanksgiving (for $30) died today. This is the second WD hard disk to give me trouble, in a row, and I think I've just about given up on WD. My 40GB maxtor has been running for 7 years now and is still doing fine. The irony is, I bought the WD to replace the aging Maxtor... :roll:

The computer was left on all night yesterday, and when I got home today the screen was blank. Restart causes the system to stop at 'detecting IDE devices', which made me think it was the IDE controller going wonky. I cold booted, and then heard a funny clicking noise from the WDHD, after which I removed it from the setup and everything booted up again.

I've since reconnected the HD and now it tells me the disk isn't formatted. How do I check to see if the HD is still working, or if the data is recoverable (short of reformatting)? In the same vein, what do the forum gods suggest for data recovery? I've got all my music in there, not to mention a lot of good... ahem... stuff accumulated over the years.

Thank you in advance. I shall sacrifice a fat juicy lamb in anticipation of the blessings from the various forum deities. :?:
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Giles Habibula
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Post by Giles Habibula »

I got nothin to help, but just to show how it just goes to show that you never can tell...

Conversely, I bought a new Maxtor 160 gig and had nothing but trouble with it. Replaced it with two 120 gig WDs and they've been running flawlessly.

I've come to the conclusion that all brand names have their share of occasional problems, so I don't worry too much any more about the brand. I mean, sure, my last Maxtor failed quickly, but the two Maxtors I've got in my 1999 rig have been running hard for 6 years without a single bad sector.
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Ranulf
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Post by Ranulf »

Can't help ya either on recovery. My sympathies. I've had 2 maxtor 160gb drives die on me this year. The original (just over 2 years old when it started to die) and its refurb replacement that lasted a mere 6 months before it started to go. I've not bothered yet to fire up the replacement I got since I bought a new sata WD 160gb. Its amazing what a decently working drive will do. Programs load faster, alt-tab doesnt take 30 seconds, no major grinding noises. :)
snowmyr
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Post by snowmyr »

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

I have a copy of this. You can create a bootable CD image, and one of the programs on it will let you copy ntfs files from one hard drive to a different, not NTFS partition.. When one of my drives failed, and windows refused to boot with it attached to the computer, this program worked.

The drawback, is that being a dos program it only deals with small file names. So all your files like "SuperNinjaMovie.avi" will be "SuperN~1.avi". Which can be a real pain.
nan desu
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Post by nan desu »

Wow snowmyr, great site.. I'm going to give it a shot... Thanks!
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Post by nan desu »

Actually, after googling it, every website I went to suggests not messing with it if yourself if you hear noises emitting from the HD. I'm screwed.

:cry:

On the bright side, apparently my hd is still under warranty.
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Post by snowmyr »

The drive is screwed. But unless you plan on paying several hundred dollars do a professional data recovery service to try and restore the data, there is no harm in trying to recover something yourself. If WD handles warranty replacements like Maxtor does, they'll take your drive back and send you a refurbished one back. You'll lose everything on it.
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Kasey Chang
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Post by Kasey Chang »

The drive is screwed.

There are two main portions of the HD that can fail. The spindle motor... The central spinner that kicks it up to 7200 RPM or whatever RPM your HD uses, and keep it there precisely, and the stepper motor, which moves the read/write heads in precise measurements to follow the tracks.

Clicking could be failure of either, but usually the stepper motor.

If you can't get it repaired, try this completely unscientific method... Raise it off the desk by about an inch, and drop it, giving it a bit of a shock (put a bit of cloth or napkins underneath to limit the shock). That sometimes MAY let you get the HD spinning enough to get the data off.

The best thing to do is get the backup current, of course.
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Post by Dhruin »

Just on different HDD brands, as a small PC integrator, I completely agree with Giles Habibula. 10 years ago we swore we'd never touch another Maxtor but damn, those Quantum Fireballs were the best until data started mysteriously disappearing in one model and we moved to Fujitsu. A known and acknowledged failure in one of the 20Gb models sent us to Seagate where we had a good run until a particular Barracuda line hit a 40% failure rate for us - I still have 40 or so we replaced under warranty when Seagate downgraded from 3yr to 1yr warranties. Currently we have excellent success with WD but I'm sure that will change with sooner or later. ;)
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Post by Kasey Chang »

I've had failures of every brand there is.

Strangely, the longest lived HD I had was a Miniscribe. Anyone remember them? Had it for my 286. :D That 40 meg HD is still there, I think.

I've had a WD that worked for 1 month, then just suddenly died with no explanation. Good thing I didn't install much on it.

I've had friends who swears by Seagate or Maxtor or whoever.

Here's a bit of trivia... For a while my former employer were the ones handling Maxtor packaging and logistics. What does that mean? It means that sticker you see on the outside, about 1/4th of a page size, with a few barcodes, probably came from a program I wrote. :D

Oh, and about the dead HD... Read this before you toss it into the trash:

http://bernardbelanger.com/computing/hd/
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The Meal
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Post by The Meal »

I, too, agree that the various manufacturers go through periods of excellent quality and periods of pushing piss-poor products out the door. Unfortunately, the same manufacturer can have multiple products in their portfolio, some of which are great, others of which reliability is a major problem. It is always the case that one poor product will affect a company's reputation for many years after the fact, even after they've cleaned up their act.

Right now the HDD industry pushes out something well over 60 million hard drives each quarter. That means about 250 million hard drives each year. Folks who look at thier own limited experience with the various manufacturers likely do not have enough statstical data to fairly rank the various reliability standards of each company. That said, I do the same things when it comes to PC hardware and other electronics in my life. If a Sony DVD player craps out of me unexpectedly, I'll swear off Sony goods for life (and not just their DVD players!).

I know that each of the various HDD manufacturers have laid eggs in the past few years (my own employer included). I have a pretty good feel for the various products that are known (in the biz) as being real dogs. The fine folks over at www.storagereview.com have a reliability index (you need to sign up for their site to see it) that tries to rank the various drive families in order of best reliability to worst. Its an imperfect system, but as a gross indicator, it's probably the best thing avialable on the web. I wouldn't let 3% difference between models sway my thoughts on a drive (the survey isn't nearly granular enough), but I'd probably let a 30% difference do so.

Right now the hard drive manufacturers shoot for a 5-year drive lifetime. Our hope is that a hard drive, kept in a favorable operating enviornment, will last on average five years. That means that for every drive that lasts seven years, there'll have to be one that fails after three. It also means that if you operate a drive in a non-favorable enviornment (dirty power supply, not well mounted to your PC rails, elevated temperatures, improper shut-downs, etc.) that your expected life for an average drive will be less than five years. Each and every drives undergoes a significant suite of tests when it comes off the manufacturing line. Roughly 9 of every 10 drives will pass these test and will get shipped out the door. The tenth drive, depending on what the testing says is wrong with it, could be reworked to see if we can make it good enough to pass the tests, or it may be completely scrapped. This tenth drive may only be off by a few percentage points on the important metrics to be determined inappropriate for sale. Conversely, there may be drives that are only marginally better than this drive that get stickers slapped on them (gently!) and sold to the masses. A perfectly viable product line can see the occassional failure 90 days into the life of the drive (which sucks royally for the end customer).

"Funny clicking noises" generally means the servo system that controls the actuator arms and determines the head positioning has failed. The heads don't know where they are, and they flail about uselessly trying to get themselves synched back up with the system. The clicks are likely from the actuator arms banging into the crash stops. I can't speak for all manufacturers (I've only worked for two of the three domestic desktop HDD companies), but my experience shows that there are only certain places on the drives "Oh Fuck Something's Not Right Flow Chart" that will see it get into one of these loops in the code where it decides that it doesn't know where it is and then starts banging on the crash stops. If it clicks like this right away when you give the drive power, then your hosed. But if its an intermittant thing, then you may be able to get your data off of it before its finally all-the-way dead. Time is of the essense, however, as it's extremely unlikely that things will magically get better inside the drive.

You got good advice for your attempts to get data off the drive. Hopefully that website had some software and you had some karma and you've made it happen. :)
Kasey Chang wrote:There are two main portions of the HD that can fail. The spindle motor... The central spinner that kicks it up to 7200 RPM or whatever RPM your HD uses, and keep it there precisely, and the stepper motor, which moves the read/write heads in precise measurements to follow the tracks.
Kasey, your knowledge of hard drives would seem to be a bit out of date. We haven't used stepper-motors in 10-15 years. Right now the actuation system that positions the heads uses a voice coil motor (VCM) which is analogous to a set of speakers. Instead of linearly driving heads across the surface of a disk, however (which is a stepper motor), the VCM rotates an actuator body on a pivot with an electromagnet to position the heads. My understanding is that stepper motors SUCKED. The VCM system is pretty elegant (but far from perfect).

It's fair to say that the two major mechanical components which could lead to failure are the motor that spins the rotating magnetic media (we just call this the 'spin motor,' or more likely the 'motor') and the VCM-driven actuator. There are lots of subsystems associated with each of these components, and there are other possibilities for hard drive failure than these two large systems. But mechanically, they're the prime culprits.
If you can't get it repaired, try this completely unscientific method... Raise it off the desk by about an inch, and drop it, giving it a bit of a shock (put a bit of cloth or napkins underneath to limit the shock). That sometimes MAY let you get the HD spinning enough to get the data off.
This may help you out if you've got heads stuck on the non-textured zone of the media. Knocking the drive has a very small chance of actually breaking the "stiction" of the heads over your data zone. It's a one-in-a-thousand fix to a 5% failure mode. The clicking that nan describes does not sound to me to be heads parked over data. In that case, dropping the drive like this has a zero percent chance of making anything better.
Kasey Chang wrote:Oh, and about the dead HD... Read this before you toss it into the trash:

http://bernardbelanger.com/computing/hd/
Holy crap. The animated graphic on that page looks like a drive with a very early version of the VCM system -- but one so convoluted and impractical at its very core that it made me shudder in fear just looking at it. HORRIBLE! That's got to predate my time in the industry by 5-10 years (I started working on hard drives in 1998).

If you're pulling top VCM plates apart (our electromagnetics), be careful you don't pinch yourself. We use *strong* magnets (especially in seek-optimized SCSI drives), and you can end up bloody. :)

~Neal
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Post by Jeff V »

Playing with HD magnets is fun, except I did once smash a finger nail with them. :oops:

You might try freezing the drive. We actually recovered data from a clicking drive once by doing this. It's a long shot, but cheaper than a data recovery joint.
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nan desu
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Post by nan desu »

I finally had time to get to it today. Been trying to use the Active NTFS reader on the CD above to try to copy the files off of the damaged HD, but not much luck there. The MBR seems to have been shot, but I'm not completely sure being a n00b at this. It detects the drive as a FAT16(BIG) drive, when I'm pretty sure I formatted it as NTFS. Hence the NTFS reader doesn't work since it doesn't copy off of FAT. Scanning using the Partition Recovery software shows that NTLDR information is missing, if I'm reading it right.

Currently trying to find something to maybe restore the MBR... we'll see.
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Post by Grundbegriff »

The bootable CD recommended above is good; we've used it at work to solve problems before. However, I once had a good experience pulling data from a semi-hosed NTFS drive using the Knoppix Live-CD, which includes support for NTFS.
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Lee
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Post by Lee »

Thanks for writing that Neal, it was interesting.
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The Meal
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Re:

Post by The Meal »

I went searching for a good "Miniscribe" comment...
Kasey Chang wrote: Thu Oct 06, 2005 10:52 am I've had failures of every brand there is.

Strangely, the longest lived HD I had was a Miniscribe. Anyone remember them? Had it for my 286. :D That 40 meg HD is still there, I think.
I worked for the company which grew out of the ashes of Miniscribe's demise. I had worked alongside *many* former Miniscribers and had heard this fascinating tale of how that company went down, including a detailed list of which local businesses would actually cash paychecks with the Miniscribe marque near the end (as no local banks would touch them). Old timers may remember that there were financial shenanigans associated with what had been considered the tech industry's hottest company around 1987 or so, and these shenanigans involved boxing and shipping bricks while purporting they were hard drives. That story is now documented in a 20 minute Youtube video.



I was on the edge of my seat for most of this video but nearly fell out of my chair when I found out that one (later) coworker with whom I had a great relationship, was actually charged in this fraud (he was the Controller at the time). If I had only known at the time, I'm betting I could've got him to tell some really great stories. (His linkedin page, hilariously, lists his work for the years 1987 and earlier as "Various Companies".)

Anyway, I hope someone around here would get a kick out of this one.
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Re: Hard Drive died... data recovery?

Post by Isgrimnur »

Loaded for later viewing and posted to my tech Slack.
It's almost as if people are the problem.
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