Sanity Check

[Donut417]

I had an 1 TB drive that came out of my mom's computer maybe a year or two ago. We upgraded to an SSD. The thought process at the time was I would grab any data she needed off at a later time. Well life happened. She dug the drive out recently, I had an old USB 2.0 PATA/SATA to USB adapter. I decided to try to pull data off. I plugged it in to my NAS, my Mac (forgot Macs cant read NTFS) and my gaming PC, the drive spins up. It shows 0 readable partions. Im fairly sure I could format the drive and it would be useable. Im guessing bit rot? The data is not critical by any means. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

what drive is this?

 

Does smart data show issues?

 

Id make a image first with something like ddrescue, then use test disk to try to get data from the image.

 

 

[Donut417]

12 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

what drive is this?

Just a WD Blue drive. 

 

12 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id make a image first with something like ddrescue, then use test disk to try to get data from the image.

So does that work if the drive doesnt get assigned a letter by Windows? Because it doesnt show up except in Disk Management. 

 

13 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Does smart data show issues?

Didn't check as I dont have any tools to pull that data. It just simply connected it to my NAS and Windows, where it recognized the drive but not the partions/data. I should mention this was a drive that Windows was installed on, So there should have been multiple partions. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Just a WD Blue drive. 

 

Which one? There are a lot of drives sold under the WD Blue label.

 

2 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

So does that work if the drive doesnt get assigned a letter by Windows? Because it doesnt show up except in Disk Management. 

 

Well DDrescue is Linux only. But it works about the same there.  You can still use disk cloning tools even if the drive isn't mounted.

 

3 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Didn't check as I dont have any tools to pull that data. It just simply connected it to my NAS and Windows, where it recognized the drive but not the partions/data. I should mention this was a drive that Windows was installed on, So there should have been multiple partions. 

Make that image first. Something like crystal disk info can help with the figureing out the smart data of the drive.

 

How important is this data, might be worth looking into data recovery services if its important.

[Donut417]

9 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How important is this data, might be worth looking into data recovery services if its important.

Not important enough to spend that kind of money. 

 

13 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Which one? There are a lot of drives sold under the WD Blue label.

 

 

 

20 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Well DDrescue is Linux only.

I do have a Linux machine for Plex server, but Im not well skilled in to usage of the command line and such. I did download DDrescue but it might be a bit much for me, it looks like I have to complie stuff?

[Donut417]

32 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Something like crystal disk info can help with the figureing out the smart data of the drive.

 

If Im reading that right, the drive is in good health.

[kokosnh]

yes, no errors. 

you can try and use HxD to view the HDD content in hex (use read only), and see if it's empty, as it shouldn't be empty, even with bit rot. 
If you are lucky, only MBR could be damaged. And if it is, even just using liveCD with ubuntu should just work. 

Do not perform any write operation on that disk... 

[johnt]

Is it possible your NAS attempted to clear the drive to add to your existing pool?

[Donut417]

6 minutes ago, johnt said:

Is it possible your NAS attempted to clear the drive to add to your existing pool?

My nas doesn't use RAID. Its literally just a 8 TB drive.

 

But I did figure out how to install it. And Im running it right now. Fingers crossed. It says it going to take 6 hours, so likely going to be well in to tomorrow before I know.

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, Donut417 said:

I do have a Linux machine for Plex server, but Im not well skilled in to usage of the command line and such. I did download DDrescue but it might be a bit much for me, it looks like I have to complie stuff?

Should be a package in most linux distros. 

 

Then use tools like photorec and testdisk to try to get the data back.

[kokosnh]

1 hour ago, Donut417 said:

My nas doesn't use RAID. Its literally just a 8 TB drive.

But I did figure out how to install it. And Im running it right now. Fingers crossed. It says it going to take 6 hours

And do you know what it is doing with that HDD, that it takes 6 hours estimated time?

or are you running some program on it yourself? 

[Donut417]

8 minutes ago, kokosnh said:

And do you know what it is doing with that HDD, that it takes 6 hours estimated time?

or are you running some program on it yourself? 

I’m running DDrescue. The drive is connected via USB 2.0. So not fast. I probably should invest in a better SATA to USB solution. 

[Donut417]

On 4/24/2025 at 8:12 PM, Electronics Wizardy said:

Should be a package in most linux distros. 

 

Then use tools like photorec and testdisk to try to get the data back.

Just an update. Got DDrescue to work. It saved an image to my NAS. Running Phtorec now. It says it's going to take a while. So I'll try to update once its done running. 

[Donut417]

It's currently 3 hours in on Photorec and it's showing 1500+ hours till completion. Does that sound right? Is there a way to specify specific file types? 

[Donut417]

@Electronics Wizardy I want to thank you for your assistance. I figured out that photorec lets you select what file types to recover. So hopefully with the reduced files it needs to recover it might go a bit faster. It’s definitely a great tool.