Question

[Jakubman625]

Hello, 

 

I have a question. I have a problem with my 1TB Hard Drive. I had my Hard Drive in my computer But it stopped working, my PC Couldn´t boot to Windows because of him. i didnt know what was wrong with the pc, i thought maybe my windows is dead, so i went to reinstall windows, but the installer couldn´t boot. So i tried other USB and it still wasn´t working. So i checked the computer and tried to unplug some drives and replugging them back. I unplugged the 1TB HardDrive and went to start the computer for installing. i forgot to press the Boot to USB key and it started to boot Windows, and it booted to windows. So i think there is some problem with the HDD. Is there any way to fix it or try if it is really dead? 

 

Thank you for your help! :)

[RONOTHAN##]

Just now, Jakubman625 said:

Hello, 

 

I have a question. I have a problem with my 1TB Hard Drive. I had my Hard Drive in my computer But it stopped working, my PC Couldn´t boot to Windows because of him. i didnt know what was wrong with the pc, i thought maybe my windows is dead, so i went to reinstall windows, but the installer couldn´t boot. So i tried other USB and it still wasn´t working. So i checked the computer and tried to unplug some drives and replugging them back. I unplugged the 1TB HardDrive and went to start the computer for installing. i forgot to press the Boot to USB key and it started to boot Windows, and it booted to windows. So i think there is some problem with the HDD. Is there any way to fix it or try if it is really dead? 

 

Thank you for your help!

I've had a similar issue before. Something on that drive corrupted and Windows wasn't able to boot. What I ended up doing to fix it was load a live Linux USB (Ubuntu works great for this) and formatted the drive through there. Linux is usually better for drive management than windows, and since it doesn't mount drives automatically (unless told to do so) you should be able to boot up and format it without any trouble. If you have issues formatting the drive in tools like GParted or fdisk, the drive might be fully dead unfortunately.

[Jakubman625]

1 minute ago, RONOTHAN## said:

I've had a similar issue before. Something on that drive corrupted and Windows wasn't able to boot. What I ended up doing to fix it was load a live Linux USB (Ubuntu works great for this) and formatted the drive through there. Linux is usually better for drive management than windows, and since it doesn't mount drives automatically (unless told to do so) you should be able to boot up and format it without any trouble. If you have issues formatting the drive in tools like GParted or fdisk, the drive might be fully dead unfortunately.

Thank you! i will try to install Linux on it and format it.  

[RONOTHAN##]

6 minutes ago, Jakubman625 said:

Thank you! i will try to install Linux on it and format it.  

You won't need to install linux on the drive, most distributions of Linux have something called a Live environment, so once the ISO is on a flash drive, all you need to do is exit out of the installer and it's like you're using a full desktop running just off the flash drive

[Jakubman625]

Just now, RONOTHAN## said:

You won't need to install linux on the drive, most distributions of Linux have something called a Live environment, so once the ISO is on a drive, all you need to do is exit out of the installer and it's like you're using a full desktop running just off the flash drive

so only thing i need to do is, create a installer, boot to it and there i can format it? 

 

[RONOTHAN##]

Just now, Jakubman625 said:

so only thing i need to do is, create a installer, boot to it and there i can format it? 

 

Exactly. As long as you pick a distro with a live environment (which is pretty much everything but openSUSE, but even that has the option for a live environment) you should be fine. I'd recommend just stock Ubuntu for this, it's easy enough to use and it will come with all the necessary utilities to format the drive available in the live environment.

[Jakubman625]

1 minute ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Exactly. As long as you pick a distro with a live environment (which is pretty much everything but openSUSE, but even that has the option for a live environment) you should be fine. I'd recommend just stock Ubuntu for this, it's easy enough to use and it will come with all the necessary utilities to format the drive available in the live environment.

Yeah i worked with Ubuntu and it really is easy to use  I will try it and i hope it will work

[Jakubman625]

11 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Exactly. As long as you pick a distro with a live environment (which is pretty much everything but openSUSE, but even that has the option for a live environment) you should be fine. I'd recommend just stock Ubuntu for this, it's easy enough to use and it will come with all the necessary utilities to format the drive available in the live environment.

Hi! So i am currently trying to run the Ubuntu installer and its loading about 10 mins, i can hear that the Hard Drive is moving and rotating, but system like bios cant find him. What can be the problem with it? 

[RONOTHAN##]

8 hours ago, Jakubman625 said:

Hi! So i am currently trying to run the Ubuntu installer and its loading about 10 mins, i can hear that the Hard Drive is moving and rotating, but system like bios cant find him. What can be the problem with it? 

If the BIOS cannot see the drive, maybe change the SATA port that it's connected to, but the drive is probably dead. If the drive is showing up in BIOS but not in Linux, see if the drive is even showing up to the system. Run this command in the terminal:

ls -a /dev/ | grep sd

Look through the output, if the drive is being detected it should show up as a file.

brw-rw----      8,0 root  1 Sep 10:01  sda
brw-rw----      8,1 root  1 Sep 10:01  sda1

This is the output I have in my system for running that command, yours might not be identical (I'm running Garuda Linux, so everything is very customized) but the information should be the same. "sd" is Linux's naming for SATA based devices like Hard drives and some SSDs. The "a" just means it's drive "a" (like drive letter assignments in Windows) and the "1" means it's the first partition on the drive. In my case since my boot drive is NVMe and the HDD is the only SATA device in the system, I just get the one device, but if you have a SATA SSD, your output might look more like this:

brw-rw----      8,0 root  1 Sep 10:01  sda
brw-rw----      8,1 root  1 Sep 10:01  sda1
brw-rw----      8,2 root  1 Sep 10:01  sda2
brw-rw----      8,3 root  1 Sep 10:01  sda3
brw-rw----      8,4 root  1 Sep 10:01  sdb
brw-rw----      8,5 root  1 Sep 10:01  sdb1

In this case the /dev/sdb device is the second HDD, and if it's not showing up there is a problem somewhere that I am not qualified to figure out. A reboot might help, but that's a big might. 

 

Assuming the drive does show up, now it's time to get it formatted, or if you care about it, get the data off of it and recovered. I'm going to assume the drive is labeled "sda", so if it is something different, change that accordingly. 

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

This will list all the partitions available on the drive. It'll also tell you some information about the drive if you care about it. The output should look something like this:

Disk /dev/sda: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Disk model: WDC WD10EZEX-08W
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x74d0a10f

Device     Boot Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1        2048 1953519615 1953517568 931.5G 83 Linux

If it says something like "fdisk not found", just run 

sudo apt install fdisk

The password if it asks for it should just be blank. 

If you want to try to get data off the drive, run these commands:

sudo mkdir /mnt/data
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/data

if the second command gives you an error, you can try running as sudo, but you probably aren't getting any data off of the drive. If you get the partition mounted (you can change the number if you had multiple partitions on the drive, they'll be listed by fdisk) and navigate to that directory using the file manager and get the data you want off. Once you get the data off if you care about it, run fdisk and follow the instructions to re-partition the drive.

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

Once that's done, you should be able to boot back into Windows and get the drive to function. If the drive doesn't work, it's probably a lost cause and you should just drill it. 

[Jakubman625]

3 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

If the BIOS cannot see the drive, maybe change the SATA port that it's connected to, but the drive is probably dead. If the drive is showing up in BIOS but not in Linux, see if the drive is even showing up to the system. Run this command in the terminal:

ls -a /dev/ | grep sd

Look through the output, if the drive is being detected it should show up as a file.

brw-rw----      8,0 root  1 Sep 10:01  sda
brw-rw----      8,1 root  1 Sep 10:01  sda1

This is the output I have in my system for running that command, yours might not be identical (I'm running Garuda Linux, so everything is very customized) but the information should be the same. "sd" is Linux's naming for SATA based devices like Hard drives and some SSDs. The "a" just means it's drive "a" (like drive letter assignments in Windows) and the "1" means it's the first partition on the drive. In my case since my boot drive is NVMe and the HDD is the only SATA device in the system, I just get the one device, but if you have a SATA SSD, your output might look more like this:

brw-rw----      8,0 root  1 Sep 10:01  sda
brw-rw----      8,1 root  1 Sep 10:01  sda1
brw-rw----      8,2 root  1 Sep 10:01  sda2
brw-rw----      8,3 root  1 Sep 10:01  sda3
brw-rw----      8,4 root  1 Sep 10:01  sdb
brw-rw----      8,5 root  1 Sep 10:01  sdb1

In this case the /dev/sdb device is the second HDD, and if it's not showing up there is a problem somewhere that I am not qualified to figure out. A reboot might help, but that's a big might. 

 

Assuming the drive does show up, now it's time to get it formatted, or if you care about it, get the data off of it and recovered. I'm going to assume the drive is labeled "sda", so if it is something different, change that accordingly. 

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

This will list all the partitions available on the drive. It'll also tell you some information about the drive if you care about it. The output should look something like this:

Disk /dev/sda: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Disk model: WDC WD10EZEX-08W
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x74d0a10f

Device     Boot Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1        2048 1953519615 1953517568 931.5G 83 Linux

If it says something like "fdisk not found", just run 

sudo apt install fdisk

The password if it asks for it should just be blank. 

If you want to try to get data off the drive, run these commands:

sudo mkdir /mnt/data
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/data

if the second command gives you an error, you can try running as sudo, but you probably aren't getting any data off of the drive. If you get the partition mounted (you can change the number if you had multiple partitions on the drive, they'll be listed by fdisk) and navigate to that directory using the file manager and get the data you want off. Once you get the data off if you care about it, run fdisk and follow the instructions to re-partition the drive.

sudo fdisk /dev/sda

Once that's done, you should be able to boot back into Windows and get the drive to function. If the drive doesn't work, it's probably a lost cause and you should just drill it. 

Hi! so The Hard Drive is working, but i can see there are 1445 bad sectors. So is there any way to repair them? And btw im happy that it can finally boot to windows without any problems  So thank you for your advice!

[RONOTHAN##]

Just now, Jakubman625 said:

Hi! so The Hard Drive is working, but i can see there are 1445 bad sectors. So is there any way to repair them? And btw im happy that it can finally boot to windows without any problems  So thank you for your advice!

A format can usually sometimes fix bad sectors, but when you see them it's not a good idea to trust the drive with anything important. I'd only put games that you have cloud saves for or things of that nature, not photos or anything that you would mind losing.

[Jakubman625]

3 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

A format can usually sometimes fix bad sectors, but when you see them it's not a good idea to trust the drive with anything important. I'd only put games that you have cloud saves for or things of that nature, not photos or anything that you would mind losing.

Oh, okay then i will be careful, and btw even in the CrystalDiskInfo its telling me that the drive is dangerous. So i will try to fix it with some CHKDSK Command. So i will see, and after that i will format the drive

 

[RONOTHAN##]

Just now, Jakubman625 said:

Oh, okay then i will be careful, and btw even in the CrystalDiskInfo its telling me that the drive is dangerous. So i will try to fix it with some CHKDSK Command. So i will see, and after that i will format the drive

 

Yeah, I personally wouldn't do anything other than maybe Chia mine on that drive, it's not worth the trouble of losing data thanks to it. That many bad sectors is usually a sign the drive is about to give the ghost.

[Jakubman625]

7 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Yeah, I personally wouldn't do anything other than maybe Chia mine on that drive, it's not worth the trouble of losing data thanks to it. That many bad sectors is usually a sign the drive is about to give the ghost.

Oh, i didnt know that. I should really invest to a new drive. Thank you for the information and thank you so much for your help! i really appreciate it!