Any way to rescue dying harddrive?

[borbra]

When I entered my home office on friday I instantly noticed a distinct ticking sound from my pc: https://imgur.com/a/V3IU7xm

It's an old Seagate 2TB, manufactured in august 2012 (12336 = 6th day of week 33 of year 2012)

 

Is there any way to get it working, if only for a limited time? would freezing it work?

 

I don't think I have any critical information stored on it, but it would be nice to check.

Went through my disks a few months ago and did backup of what I deemed irreplaceable.

[Guest]

Copy all your data you want to keep. NOW... before replying.

Be sure you have EVERYTHING you want.

Crystal Disk Info is a free program that you can use to check the health of your drives.

[borbra]

1 minute ago, fpo said:

Copy all your data you want to keep. NOW... before replying.

Be sure you have EVERYTHING you want.

Crystal Disk Info is a free program that you can use to check the health of your drives.

I can't get anything out of it atm, hence this post.

Coincidentally I was checking Crystaldisk just a few days prior, and the disk was sitting at a yellow "Warning" at that time.

I have another drive (that only contains cloud stuff like steamgames/dropbox etc) that's also yellow, but has been fine for a looong time, hence I didn't think this one was about to die so quickly.

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, borbra said:

I can't get anything out of it atm, hence this post.

Coincidentally I was checking Crystaldisk just a few days prior, and the disk was sitting at a yellow "Warning" at that time.

I have another drive (that only contains cloud stuff like steamgames/dropbox etc) that's also yellow, but has been fine for a looong time, hence I didn't think this one was about to die so quickly.

You can open some documents and then "Save As" to another location/drive.

I'm not an expert but some files may already be gone; I'd await others before doing anything else but....

1. DON'T TRY THIS YET.... Recurva is a data loss recovery program, but I don't know how much wear it will put on your drive.
2. You could pay a data recovery center to use high tech equipment to save any lost files.

 

If you have everything you need and you are 9,999% positive you have everything, then you could dispose of the drive after physically altering the disks (drill a hole through them) and have the drive properly recycled by an electronics recycler.

[Bombastinator]

The problem I take it is you’re contacting after the drive stopped working entirely.  This is too late generally.  The freezer trick involved mercury bearings, which I doubt your drive has, and the idea was heating and cooling cycles to coalesce the mercury around the spindle so it could go for one final death spin so you could get your data off.  By this point it’s a job for a hard drive recovery service.  They’re REALLY expensive.  The drive will have to be disassembled in a cleanspace  filled with the same gas as is in the drive (sometimes it was argon or helium) the platter removed, and then read. It’s a PITA very much justifying the high cost.  Do you have a backup of this dead drive?  How valuable is the data?  The general rule with hard drives is a drive with errors generally develop more quite quickly.  It’s often an accelerating problem.  Hard drives are not things you can nurse along like a beater automobile. The problem is they are sealed and the interior is unreasonably clean.  The only way to work on those interior parts is a cleanspace.  My personal SOP is if a drive has any errors at all I make an extra backup of the data and go buy a new drive.  This running things in the yellow will eventually bite a person as it seems you have been bitten.

I have a friend who is a sysop who’s joke was that the moral of every story ever written was “always make backups”

[borbra]

52 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

The problem I take it is you’re contacting after the drive stopped working entirely.  This is too late generally.  The freezer trick involved mercury bearings, which I doubt your drive has, and the idea was heating and cooling cycles to coalesce the mercury around the spindle so it could go for one final death spin so you could get your data off.  By this point it’s a job for a hard drive recovery service.  They’re REALLY expensive.  The drive will have to be disassembled in a cleanspace  filled with the same gas as is in the drive (sometimes it was argon or helium) the platter removed, and then read. It’s a PITA very much justifying the high cost.  Do you have a backup of this dead drive?  How valuable is the data?  The general rule with hard drives is a drive with errors generally develop more quite quickly.  It’s often an accelerating problem.  Hard drives are not things you can nurse along like a beater automobile. The problem is they are sealed and the interior is unreasonably clean.  The only way to work on those interior parts is a cleanspace.  My personal SOP is if a drive has any errors at all I make an extra backup of the data and go buy a new drive.  This running things in the yellow will eventually bite a person as it seems you have been bitten.

I have a friend who is a sysop who’s joke was that the moral of every story ever written was “always make backups”

I don't think any valuable data has been lost, as stated in another posted I went through my data a few months ago and backup up everything I didn't want to loose.

Only thing I know I've "lost" so far is a few games (easily downloadable again).

All data I'm worried about I've had cloud backup on for over a year, and atm I'm doing another backup to an external harddrive to put off site (at my office most likely)

 

I just wanted to know of any other tricks then the freezing one that might work. If only I'm able to see the folder structure (so I know what I've lost) that would be more then fine.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, borbra said:

I don't think any valuable data has been lost, as stated in another posted I went through my data a few months ago and backup up everything I didn't want to loose.

Only thing I know I've "lost" so far is a few games (easily downloadable again).

All data I'm worried about I've had cloud backup on for over a year, and atm I'm doing another backup to an external harddrive to put off site (at my office most likely)

 

I just wanted to know of any other tricks then the freezing one that might work. If only I'm able to see the folder structure (so I know what I've lost) that would be more then fine.

Then just toss it and buy a new one.  Attempting to use it for anything is a bad idea imho.  That goes for the other yellow drive as well likely.  It is not reliable and could die at any time.

[borbra]

Tried the freezing method, but it didn't do anything.

 

Checked my server, and one of the drives there also has a warning, so now I've ordred a new drive for each machine.

Guess I've learned to check on my drives more often.

[Bombastinator]

On 8/15/2022 at 4:52 PM, borbra said:

I don't think any valuable data has been lost, as stated in another posted I went through my data a few months ago and backup up everything I didn't want to loose.

Only thing I know I've "lost" so far is a few games (easily downloadable again).

All data I'm worried about I've had cloud backup on for over a year, and atm I'm doing another backup to an external harddrive to put off site (at my office most likely)

 

I just wanted to know of any other tricks then the freezing one that might work. If only I'm able to see the folder structure (so I know what I've lost) that would be more then fine.

If there’s no data worth retrieving because you already have copies there isn’t any point in doing anything.  It seems like what you want to do is make the thing run longer.  Nurse it along like a beater automobile.  You can’t replace worn parts because it’s so incredibly hard and expensive to get inside to do it.  Imagine trying to do that with a beater automobile that cost a thousand dollars to open the hood.  There wouldn’t BE any beater automobiles. Just buy new ones.  It’s the only even vaguely reasonable option anyway.

[Chiyawa]

On 8/16/2022 at 4:34 AM, borbra said:

I have another drive (that only contains cloud stuff like steamgames/dropbox etc) that's also yellow, but has been fine for a looong time, hence I didn't think this one was about to die so quickly.

This drive could only have a few bad sectors in it, or it could be that there are some data corruption in it. A simple checkdisk may sometimes clear this warning altogether by marking the bad sectors of the drive and do some simple recovery.

[Bombastinator]

46 minutes ago, Chiyawa said:

This drive could only have a few bad sectors in it, or it could be that there are some data corruption in it. A simple checkdisk may sometimes clear this warning altogether by marking the bad sectors of the drive and do some simple recovery.

The issue I have is a few bad sectors often turns into more bad sectors at an ever increasing rate.  There is some slop with hard drives.  Catastrophic failure is rarely instant, but hard drives are wear parts.  They always eventually fail. When I said I start looking for a new drive when I see errors start to crop up this is what I mean.  It will take a while to get a new drive, and by the time I’ve got one the original drive is just about totally done.

Edited August 25, 2022 by Bombastinator

[Chiyawa]

57 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

*Snip

True.

 

Still, sometimes your HDD just need a little house keeping. I have a drive with 4KB bad sectors that runs fine for almost 4 years now (daily use). Of course I don't write a lot to that drive as the drive is use to store game files only.

 

I wish Seagate and WD made HDD like they used to. The HDD from 2000 still function quite well, with virtually no flaw, only 160GB capacity though and uses 1st gen SATA interface. The power on cycle is a staggering over 4 million times!

[Bombastinator]

5 minutes ago, Chiyawa said:

True.

 

Still, sometimes your HDD just need a little house keeping. I have a drive with 4KB bad sectors that runs fine for almost 4 years now (daily use). Of course I don't write a lot to that drive as the drive is use to store game files only.

 

I wish Seagate and WD made HDD like they used to. The HDD from 2000 still function quite well, with virtually no flaw, only 160GB capacity though and uses 1st gen SATA interface. The power on cycle is a staggering over 4 million times!

One can get lucky.  Nothing lasts forever though.

[Chiyawa]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

One can get lucky.  Nothing lasts forever though.

Indeed. but with manufacturer always cutting cost, their products tend to be bad. Many drives are DOA in recent time (got 50 for my company's servers, 2 DOA). I think we push HDD way beyond the threshold that even a small error causes the whole drive to cease function.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, Chiyawa said:

Indeed. but with manufacturer always cutting cost, their products tend to be bad. Many drives are DOA in recent time (got 50 for my company's servers, 2 DOA). I think we push HDD way beyond the threshold that even a small error causes the whole drive to cease function.

Very possibly.  That’s the whole yield theory thing. 4% failure rate after QC is wildly high though.  Should be well under 1%.  Obviously better QC is needed for that model.

[Chiyawa]

12 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Very possibly.  That’s the whole yield theory thing. 4% failure rate after QC is wildly high though.  Should be well under 1%.  Obviously better QC is needed for that model.

Well, we later found out from our suppliers that they too are facing a lot of return due to failure. Probably they just got unlucky and got a batch that has high failure rate. They do send out replacement. It could be issues of transportation because HDD are very sensitive to strong vibration.

[Bombastinator]

21 minutes ago, Chiyawa said:

Well, we later found out from our suppliers that they too are facing a lot of return due to failure. Probably they just got unlucky and got a batch that has high failure rate. They do send out replacement. It could be issues of transportation because HDD are very sensitive to strong vibration.

Makes me wonder if it’s a suppler problem.  Something that is supposed to be in spec and is assumed to be in spec actually isn’t.  This is how the problem with the apple power supplies happened.  Time to audit the suppliers.  Considering the ultra clean and extremely tight tolerance nature of hard drives it might even be a parts packaging or shipment issue.  Soviet red eye missile boxes for example couldn’t touch the ground more than momentarily.  It was bad enough that any missile ever stored in a stack on the ground was eventually assumed to be non functional.  More red eyes were lost that way than were ever fired.