HD Recovery

[Gray16]

I have (Had) a Seagate FreeAgent Go 250gb portable hard drive, I have had this several years. Sadly one day I was an idiot and my assumptions that glass tables do not conduct electricity was painfully incorrect, so much so that I ended up hearing a crackle when I placed the hard drive on said table. What made it even more painful was the fact I realised I had not backed the data up on the portable hard drive, and on my main computer I had completed a format and moved the data - A decision I regret clearly!

 

This incident happened years ago, and each year I come back to it hoping that advancements in software can one day reunite me with any data I may have lost, but each year I become disappointed as I get further away from trying to rectify this, the belief that the data may still be housed on the hard drive makes me want to continue trying...

 

I have cracked open the housing contained within the Seagate which has left me with just the hard drive, so I have hooked it up to a SATA Dock which is externally powered. My BIOS can recognise the hard drive, and so does Windows 10 (All various versions did also). In Windows 10 Disk Management it shows as "Disk 3, Unknown 232gb Not Initialised" and the bar is "Unallocated". If I click on Initialize Disk it wants me to partition the drive using MBR or GPT. I have not accepted neither option because I don't want to risk losing the data on the hard drive permanently.

 

I have tried various data recovery software as well as various scans without any success. Partition Magic, Partition Wizard, HD Tune, Data Recovery Pro - None have been successful in repairing this.

 

HD Tune states that "(C5) Current Pending Sector" has a warning status attached, the scan indicates that this has 100% Damaged Blocks. 

Realistically I don't know what else I can do, software seems to be not helping at all, the only thing I can think of is to send it off to a Data Recovery Centre, but for about 10gb of saved data that doesn't seem worthwhile and costly to boot.

 

I am keeping the hard drive setup for a few more days again, so if you want me to try anything I can certainly go for it and hope for the best.

[ProjectBox153]

How did a glass table make it short out if it was in it's enclosure?

[Pengu1N]

1 minute ago, Jamiec1130 said:

How did a glass table make it short out if it was in it's enclosure?

Maybe the table had metal legs arcing past the glass? just a guess

[Pengu1N]

try to go to a computer hardware repair store, and see if they think they can fix it. if they have an idea that they think might work, then you should probably just pay them. and if it doesn't work, you can probably get your money back. good luck!

 

[Gray16]

Well, it was more of a glass TV table, so it had the TV on it, I connected the hard drive to the TV (If I recall..) and I placed it on the glass, which unbeknowst to me had static electricity built up from the TV and other eletrical devices. An error I won't ever forget in the future...!

 

Sadly in my area the hardware stores are somewhat untrustworthy or just not that good. Past issues with them where they try to fleece customers for money over simple jobs! For instance trying to sell me a new motherboard instead of replacing a BIOS Chip, No effort put in at all!

[Unimportant]

@Gray16 : Typically, when dealing with a crashed but still responsive drive, you'd clone the drive first. (We use HDClone for that, but there's lots of choices). Because:

• Sequential reading is gentle to a already damaged drive and has a larger chance of success.
• The drive may suffer all kinds of weird behavior when ordered to read bad sectors, this can cause attempts to access the drive fail. The clone on a fresh drive on the other hand will suffer no such hardware weirdness and more often then not work far better, even if the dead sectors were not copied.
• You want to grab the data from the defective drive as fast as possible before it fails even harder and put it out of it's misery. By attempting all kinds of data recovery on the broken drive you probably made things worse.

So, if the data is important to you, stop at once and turn everything off and first clone the drive to another good drive. It's preferred to perform this cloning with internal sata ports, not trough the USB enclosure.

 

EDIT: If you see endless read errors while cloning you're pretty much ****** tough. But in many cases there'll only be some limited amount of failed sectors and the clone has high hopes of working somewhat, and then you can let datarecovery software have a go.