Hard Drive No Longer Recognized

[Bookhugger]

Hello folks,

So I've been having trouble with my secondary HDD for the past month or so. The drive is a WD Blue 4TB that has been stuck on 100% usage and basically been useless for the past couple months. Today however I noticed that the drive is no longer showing up in windows explorer and in disk manager shows up as uninitialized. The drive is still detected in my BIOs however. What are some trouble shooting steps I can take to get my drive back while also keeping the data on it? 

Please feel free to ask questions. Any and all advice is much appreciated! 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id copy the data off with ddrescue in linux. It will pull the data off near the bad chunks and get as much as possilbe, unlike most cloning utilites that will just stop. I don't know of a equivalent on any other os.

 

Then you can mount the image and copy the files off.

 

If this fails, send it to a recovery place of restore the backups.

[Bookhugger]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id copy the data off with ddrescue in linux. It will pull the data off near the bad chunks and get as much as possilbe, unlike most cloning utilites that will just stop. I don't know of a equivalent on any other os.

 

Then you can mount the image and copy the files off.

 

If this fails, send it to a recovery place of restore the backups.

Are there any less drastic measures I can take to possibly have the drive recognized again? I really have very little experience with data management and I skeptical in my abilities. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

15 minutes ago, Bookhugger said:

Are there any less drastic measures I can take to possibly have the drive recognized again? I really have very little experience with data management and I skeptical in my abilities. 

Restore your backups?

 

Since your drive is failing, you want to make a image. The more you touch it the less likely you are to get the data back, and that method above the the best easy way to make a image.

[DailyProcrastinator]

Unfotanetly possible data loss rarely yields in a easy fix, as said you're going to have to find a way pull off the data, so you'll have to do some research on the google to find some (hopefully) free software that can pull off the data and then put it onto a new harddrive. Because at this point something is seriously wrong with the one you are using. For the time being I would not power that harddrive at all, as to avoid complete data corruption assuming it hasn't yet happened. At that point you would have to go and look up someone in your city who deals with pulling data off dead hard drives and it's usually not cheap. I had that issue happen on my server but it was due to a short in my system and it cost me a shit ton. So I'm sorry I have no real way of telling you how to easily fix that, just a bit of guidance and advice is all I know on the subject since I've dealt with dead hard drives and data recovery before. And every situation differs from another. I now run all my hard drives with file copy software or the easiest in a 2 hardrive setup is raid 1, so if one drive dies you just have everything always written to the second one.

[Bookhugger]

Just now, JM21 said:

Unfotanetly possible data loss rarely yields in a easy fix, as said you're going to have to find a way pull off the data, so you'll have to do some research on the google to find some (hopefully) free software that can pull off the data and then put it onto a new harddrive. Because at this point something is seriously wrong with the one you are using. For the time being I would not power that harddrive at all, as to avoid complete data corruption assuming it hasn't yet happened. At that point you would have to go and look up someone in your city who deals with pulling data off dead hard drives and it's usually not cheap. I had that issue happen on my server but it was due to a short in my system and it cost me a shit ton. So I'm sorry I have no real way of telling you how to easily fix that, just a bit of guidance and advice is all I know on the subject since I've dealt with dead hard drives and data recovery before. And every situation differs from another. I now run all my hard drives with file copy software or the easiest in a 2 hardrive setup is raid 1, so if one drive dies you just have everything always written to the second one.

So power down my system and then unplug the drive for now? 

[DailyProcrastinator]

1 minute ago, Bookhugger said:

So power down my system and then unplug the drive for now? 

I definitely would unplug that drive yes. Do you have your OS on another harddrive or SSD? If so that helps so your system is still usable without that harddrive.

[Bookhugger]

Just now, JM21 said:

I definitely would unplug that drive yes. Do you have your OS on another harddrive or SSD? If so that helps so your system is still usable without that harddrive.

Yes, I have my OS on a boot SSD. Also is there any way I can figure out what caused the failure? I brought the drive less than a year ago and haven't even put 1TB on it. If it's something to with my other hardware I'd like to know so I don't ruin the next drive I get...

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 minutes ago, Bookhugger said:

Yes, I have my OS on a boot SSD. Also is there any way I can figure out what caused the failure? I brought the drive less than a year ago and haven't even put 1TB on it. If it's something to with my other hardware I'd like to know so I don't ruin the next drive I get...

hdd will just fail. Thats why we have backups.

[Bookhugger]

Just now, JM21 said:

Unfotanetly possible data loss rarely yields in a easy fix, as said you're going to have to find a way pull off the data, so you'll have to do some research on the google to find some (hopefully) free software that can pull off the data and then put it onto a new harddrive. Because at this point something is seriously wrong with the one you are using. For the time being I would not power that harddrive at all, as to avoid complete data corruption assuming it hasn't yet happened. At that point you would have to go and look up someone in your city who deals with pulling data off dead hard drives and it's usually not cheap. I had that issue happen on my server but it was due to a short in my system and it cost me a shit ton. So I'm sorry I have no real way of telling you how to easily fix that, just a bit of guidance and advice is all I know on the subject since I've dealt with dead hard drives and data recovery before. And every situation differs from another. I now run all my hard drives with file copy software or the easiest in a 2 hardrive setup is raid 1, so if one drive dies you just have everything always written to the second one.

So after some searching I believe I don't actually have any irreplaceable stuff on the drive. So is the drive for sure dead? Is there a way to get the drive back if I don't need to keep the data?
 

[DailyProcrastinator]

9 minutes ago, Bookhugger said:

Yes, I have my OS on a boot SSD. Also is there any way I can figure out what caused the failure? I brought the drive less than a year ago and haven't even put 1TB on it. If it's something to with my other hardware I'd like to know so I don't ruin the next drive I get...

 

Okay good that your OS is on a SSD, that helps a lot. But harddrives just fail sometimes, it just happens. Outside of my server (which was a whole other monster to deal with) I’ve had hard drives fail in my main computer systems too. Some in a couple years and I’ve had some fail in less than 8 months (usually Seagate Barracudas 7200rpm drives) and that’s why I always run my harddrives in raid 1 at the very least. As far as worrying about something in your system causing it to fail I find it very unlikely, my situation was a very unique one, and my shitty Ebay special server rack case is mostly to blame so I wouldn’t even worry about it being another possible issue.

[DailyProcrastinator]

5 minutes ago, Bookhugger said:

So after some searching I believe I don't actually have any irreplaceable stuff on the drive. So is the drive for sure dead? Is there a way to get the drive back if I don't need to keep the data?
 

1

Not that harddrive no. You'll need to replace it. If you aren't comfortable with working with raid configs, although it is very easy. Especially just a raid 1 config. Western Digital Black hardrives are super solid, you pay the premium but they last a very very long time. I have yet to have one die on me.

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, JM21 said:

Not that harddrive no. You'll need to replace it. If you aren't comfortable with working with raid configs, although it is very easy. Especially just a raid 1 config. Western Digital Black hardrives are super solid, you pay the premium but they last a very very long time. I have yet to have one die on me.

don't use raid 1, get a backup. Raid 1 won't help you from drive corruption due to the os, accential deletion, randomware, and many other things. It also adds a point of failure.