Is there any way to salvage this drive?

Bellator · Jan 28, 2007, 03:34 AM

I finally had my first drive break on me. It is a western digital caviar wd2500ks 250GB SATA drive. I have had it for just under a month. Have only actually been using it for half a month.

I am not sure what led to it breaking. Upon booting my computer I received a blue screen, so I used the power button to turn the computer off. When I rebooted my drive started making a clicking sound (like if you stuck something in the spokes of a bicycle tire). It makes the sound in bursts of about 3 seconds, then it makes a very loud click, pause, and then the cycle repeats. It does not sound good at all.

It takes the VIA controller MUCH longer to recognize the drive on boot. When I loaded Norton Ghost it encountered bad sectors on the drive (which doesn't surprise me).

I plan on using ghost or perhaps a dos level file browser to save as many files as I can, but I am wondering the following:

1. First, is this just random bad luck, or is there a reason why something like this would happen? The drive has not encountered any physical trauma. The only thing is that the side cover of my case has been off as I have been doing a lot of work on my rig recently, but there is very little dust in the case (and aren't drives hermetically sealed anyways?)

2. Second, in a case like this is there really anything I can do to fix the drive, or is RMA really my only option.

3. Finally with bad sectors what is my best strategy for trying to salvage the data off the drive?

Any and all help greatly appreciated as this drive has a lot of important data on it...

Necrosis · Jan 28, 2007, 03:57 AM

First take a look at these two links:

1. http://myharddrivedied.com/presentations.html

2. http://www.runtime.org/

If a piece of electronic hardware is going to die it will normally be in the first 30 days. I think you were just unlucky on this one. I've been through the same experience myself.

Dyre Straits · Jan 28, 2007, 04:20 AM

Bellator, is it possible that anytime since you bought the drive that you've had a bad storm in the area that caused power outage or brownouts? If so, that's all a hard drive needs to damage it.

It's one reason I have a UPS on my rigs.

Also, I've been able to retrieve certain data from previously damaged (pre-UPS days) drives by making sure they are kept exceptionally cold and then installing them as secondary drives while retrieving data from them...usually through DOS. You can put the HD into a plastic storage bag and place it in the freezer to get it exceptionally cold. Remove it, hook it up, retrieve what you can while you can and repeat the process as needed.

So far, I've been very lucky to retrieve all essential data this way.

Good luck to you!

Bellator · Jan 28, 2007, 04:46 AM

whoah... dyre now that you mention it we have been experiencing sporadic brownouts in the past few days (in fact the last one just happened not 15 minutes ago). I had no idea this could affect a hard drive... I thought the surge protector and technology in the PSU is suppossed to counteract these fluctuations? ( I have a good Antec power supply)

I will try your method to salvage the data and let you know how it works out. Is there any particular DOS file browser you would recommend, or is a plain old DOS boot disk and the copy command good enough? My data partition is FAT32 so compatibility shouldn't be a problem (with file browsers that is).

The other method I was considering was installing a ghost image of my system partition onto my backup drive, installing the busted drive as secondary, and using windows to transfer the files. Is this a better way to go, or is it safer to go with DOS?

Necrosis thank you for the links I am looking through them now.

Thanks a lot guys... and Dyre I'm pretty damn impressed your first hunch was power/brownouts and we have been having chronic brownouts lately. Yer like an IT shaman!

Dyre Straits · Jan 28, 2007, 05:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bellator

whoah... dyre now that you mention it we have been experiencing sporadic brownouts in the past few days (in fact the last one just happened not 15 minutes ago). I had no idea this could affect a hard drive... I thought the surge protector and technology in the PSU is suppossed to counteract these fluctuations? ( I have a good Antec power supply)

I will try your method to salvage the data and let you know how it works out. Is there any particular DOS file browser you would recommend, or is a plain old DOS boot disk and the copy command good enough? My data partition is FAT32 so compatibility shouldn't be a problem (with file browsers that is).

The other method I was considering was installing a ghost image of my system partition onto my backup drive, installing the busted drive as secondary, and using windows to transfer the files. Is this a better way to go, or is it safer to go with DOS?

Necrosis thank you for the links I am looking through them now.

Thanks a lot guys... and Dyre I'm pretty damn impressed your first hunch was power/brownouts and we have been having chronic brownouts lately. Yer like an IT shaman!

Nah, not really.

We just live in an area where we have 'em enough I decided to get a UPS.

Anyway, if you can get the drive recognized at all in Windows you 'might' be able to transfer data that way. However, I've had very little luck doing it this way if the drive is really bad.

So, the ol' DOS Boot and Copy Files command has been my personal standby. AND, I'm glad I haven't had to do it in awhile.

Good luck and do let us know how it goes.

EDIT: BTW, the surge protectors and such: They won't maintain the proper UPPER voltage during brownouts. Brownouts are due to UNDER current. SURGE protectors help to prevent SPIKES in the current.

Bellator · Jan 29, 2007, 01:19 AM

**update**

first, thanks again for your help as this hard drive had incredibly important personal data on it...

I tried freezing my hard drive, and after it thawed a little I was able to get the VIA controller to successfully recognize the disk. (woohoo)

However it turns out my storage partition was NTFS and not FAT32 as I had thought! Obviously this put me into a pickle as far as using DOS to copy the files goes.

I tried to load the Ultimate Boot CD and use some of the utilities on there, however UBCD froze when scanning the hard drives... I tried loading different utilities but they all froze when loading.

I next tried loading the windows recovery console off my XP disk, although despite the NTFS support I was not exactly looking forward to using the vanilla copy command (instead of xcopy) to manually copy each file and preserve the directory structures (especially when I have 170GB of data on that disk).

Again however the setup screen froze on loading...

The ONLY utility that both loaded AND recognized the NTFS partition (all the partitions on the disk in fact) was Norton Ghost. I was in love with this prog before but now I'm freakin' worshipping it... all that industrial strength recovery power in a mere 1MB .exe!

As I write this (on my laptop) Ghost is transferring the files onto a separate disk, so now it's pretty much in the hands of the storage gods how much will be corrupted beyond use.

Thanks again and cross your fingers for me!

BTW

I did a little research and I think this is the UPS I'm going to go with:
http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16842107113

the main specs page here:
http://www.opti-ups.com/ups_detail.phtml?product_id=51

it is a line-interactive model, and i read that opti-ups is a pretty good UPS maker?

Dyre Straits · Jan 29, 2007, 03:37 AM

Good luck to you...keeping my fingers crossed.

Just FWIW: ANY UPS is better than none at all.

H3X4D3C1M4L · Jan 30, 2007, 04:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dyre Straits

Good luck to you...keeping my fingers crossed.

Just FWIW: ANY UPS is better than none at all.

Unless its made by Ultra... I saw one of those explode.

BTW for future reference Bellator, there's an easy way to copy off the entire contents of the drive, each sector, no matter the filesystem or how many damaged sectors (damaged sectors may not contain the data they originally had but eh).

All you need is the Knoppix LiveCD/DVD, a working DC/DVD drive on the machine in question, another machine on a network with free space equalling the total capacity of the drive you're copying off, and a little know how

The dd command has salvaged many a drive, and I find that Knoppix or Linux in general is MUCH better at reading data off a damaged drive than Windows.

Bellator · Feb 1, 2007, 01:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by H3X4D3C1M4L

Unless its made by Ultra... I saw one of those explode.

BTW for future reference Bellator, there's an easy way to copy off the entire contents of the drive, each sector, no matter the filesystem or how many damaged sectors (damaged sectors may not contain the data they originally had but eh).

All you need is the Knoppix LiveCD/DVD, a working DC/DVD drive on the machine in question, another machine on a network with free space equalling the total capacity of the drive you're copying off, and a little know how

The dd command has salvaged many a drive, and I find that Knoppix or Linux in general is MUCH better at reading data off a damaged drive than Windows.

Does Knoppix have NTFS support?

Also didn't even bother trying to copy in Windows (no way drive would last long enough to load it). Went with Norton Ghost 2003 (in DOS)... Drive would do all of its clacking and groaning booting up and during initial scans, but Ghost was still able to see the drive. At first Ghost kindly informed me that the drive was Fubar'd, but I told it to ignore that and make the image anyways.

Once it started actually making the image the drive quieted down and things went pretty smoothly... but alas didn't work after all. Since the only drives I had to copy to were smaller than the partition I was copying I had to enable volume spanning... well guess what? Image creation went perfect until it had to create the new span... Then the clacking and groaning started up again (I guess ghost was rescanning the drive) and the process aborted..

Did that three times and every time ghost failed when making the new span. I got to 91% on the first creation, but there's no way to recover files from partial ghost images... so all that data was useless.

I tried some other things but the util that finally did the job for me was Active@ NTFS Reader for DOS. It's a damn nice program, DOS GUI and all. I was able to copy all my documents and pictures, but then the drive finally lost the fight.

Only 1gig out of 173 gigs salvaged... but those were the most important files so I guess I can call it a success story, especially considering how bad a racket the drive was making...

Plus I learned a heckuva lot about a heckuva lot trying to save this drive too, so I guess that also makes it kind of a success...

Dyre Straits · Feb 1, 2007, 08:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by H3X4D3C1M4L

Unless its made by Ultra... I saw one of those explode.

BTW for future reference Bellator, there's an easy way to copy off the entire contents of the drive, each sector, no matter the filesystem or how many damaged sectors (damaged sectors may not contain the data they originally had but eh).

All you need is the Knoppix LiveCD/DVD, a working DC/DVD drive on the machine in question, another machine on a network with free space equalling the total capacity of the drive you're copying off, and a little know how

The dd command has salvaged many a drive, and I find that Knoppix or Linux in general is MUCH better at reading data off a damaged drive than Windows.

OUCH! Do you remember the model offhand? I'm using other brands but never had one explode.

H3X4D3C1M4L · Feb 6, 2007, 03:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bellator

Does Knoppix have NTFS support?

Also didn't even bother trying to copy in Windows (no way drive would last long enough to load it). Went with Norton Ghost 2003 (in DOS)... Drive would do all of its clacking and groaning booting up and during initial scans, but Ghost was still able to see the drive. At first Ghost kindly informed me that the drive was Fubar'd, but I told it to ignore that and make the image anyways.

Once it started actually making the image the drive quieted down and things went pretty smoothly... but alas didn't work after all. Since the only drives I had to copy to were smaller than the partition I was copying I had to enable volume spanning... well guess what? Image creation went perfect until it had to create the new span... Then the clacking and groaning started up again (I guess ghost was rescanning the drive) and the process aborted..

Did that three times and every time ghost failed when making the new span. I got to 91% on the first creation, but there's no way to recover files from partial ghost images... so all that data was useless.

I tried some other things but the util that finally did the job for me was Active@ NTFS Reader for DOS. It's a damn nice program, DOS GUI and all. I was able to copy all my documents and pictures, but then the drive finally lost the fight.

Only 1gig out of 173 gigs salvaged... but those were the most important files so I guess I can call it a success story, especially considering how bad a racket the drive was making...

Plus I learned a heckuva lot about a heckuva lot trying to save this drive too, so I guess that also makes it kind of a success...

Knoppix will read NTFS, mounts it read only when you click on it and I think the latest DVD has experimental RW support for NTFS. (Good thing though it doesn't touch the drive unless you try and mount it yourself).

dd doesn't care what the filesystem is because its grabbing the blocks and whatever's in them so no filesystem interpretation is needed. Hint with that though: For most drives its easier to pipe the dd command to split so that it splits it at 2GB and doesn't get stuck half way because the networked machine can't have files larger than 2GB

@Dyre: It was a cheap 500VA one from TigerDirect my friend picked up. We went and plugged it in and BOOM, took out a good number of fuses as well as the patch of carpet it was set upon. Luckily the battery didn't blow up, hot lead acid all over the place wouldn't have been fun.