Advice on hard drive showing caution in crystal disk (Screenshot)

Soulstorm brew

Weaksauce
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Mar 29, 2019
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Hi all , I have a 2tb wd green that is showing caution signs , It is used as an external backup drive with low hours .

here´s the screen shot from crystal disk.

74wDuNDgyCsIqG6KR3PE0Y6RgyLlobbd8hISi2K4NHllzpwxSGGRNQbUidLSmuawMWVclW9NFWf2AcIzfNo=w945-h831-no.jpg

Just looking for advice , is it salvageable , are there tools to run diagnosis / correction ?
 
Well, I’m not a hard drive expert and couldn’t say if it’s salvageable or not, but I would comment given the name if the error your seeing - if it were my drive it would be replaced ASAP
 
First, back up your data if you haven't already. Then run an extended test using WD's diagnostic utility.


The reallocation event count is still 0. So I wouldn't freak out over this just yet. C6 just means that the drive encountered 9 sectors that couldn't be read correctly and the embedded ECC data couldn't fix them. There's probably a dozen different reasons why that might happen. So it's not necessarily indicative of a bad drive. C5 means that the drive is waiting until those sectors are read again to determine if they are truly un-correctable. If they are, then they'll be remapped and C4 will increment. If not, then C5 (and I think C6) will just go down. If those numbers start climbing, then there's a problem. If not, then you're good. But still back up your data.
 
Thanks , This is my mother in laws disk , I´ll check if she has a backup before using the utilities. She told me she had a problem with the external enclosure and her laptop was´nt picking it up properly. I imagine she has been switching it on and off a thousand time trying to get it to work lol.
She gave it to me to have a look at , The power switch on the enclosure was seized :inpain: not sure how , so I removed and plugged the hd into my desktop and yeah that´s what CD showed. I´ll run some tests on it later and let you know how it went , thanks again.
 
The only way to really get it to properly remap those pending sectors is to image the data, full format the disk (which will take hours), and copy the image contents back to it. Half the time the pending sectors return to service and it will be able to determine this once the sectors are not in use. It may also mark them bad and dip into reserved sectors (reallocation). I would keep an eye on it but it is likely still worthy of use.

Good opportunity to get in on the super cheap SSD prices these days though! Thats what we do at the MSP I work at. Extinguish mechanical system drives one at a time :D
 
Thanks for that , I´m transferring all the data onto my disks at the moment , I´ll then try the full format , recopy and see if it works.
Just full format it in windows or use 3rd party software?
 
Small update , I think it´s almost dead .
Last night I managed to copy about half (900gig) off of the drive. It started saying can´t copy file x , I skipped a couple of these and it continued , until it just froze.
I tried booting the pc with it hooked up internally this morning and pc wont boot with it connected , Remove the drive and the pc boots normally, it´s making a noise like the heads are jammed ,if I can´t get it to spin up with a few more tries, I might look at opening it up and try freeing up the heads.
 
Before you try drastic measures that are 99.99999% likely to fail, hot plug the drive (by inserting the SATA data cable) with the OS booted.
 
I like to use images from freeware of Aomei Backupper, Macrium Reflect, or Active@ as the resultant image file is not the same size as the disk volume, only the stored data and they have better error handling than windows. If none of these will fully image, I would just pull the most important data and reinstall windows after a full format.
Thanks for that , I´m transferring all the data onto my disks at the moment , I´ll then try the full format , recopy and see if it works.
Just full format it in windows or use 3rd party software?
 
I tried that , hot swapping the sata and the power cable , different sata headers etc , I will be trying a few more times , Opening it will be the very last straw.


PliotronX This is´nt the boot drive , it´s just a slave 2tb used for media, but yeah as i was saying , I´m struggling to get this sucker even running to pull the data off of it.
 
Small update , I think it´s almost dead .
Last night I managed to copy about half (900gig) off of the drive. It started saying can´t copy file x , I skipped a couple of these and it continued , until it just froze.
I tried booting the pc with it hooked up internally this morning and pc wont boot with it connected , Remove the drive and the pc boots normally, it´s making a noise like the heads are jammed ,if I can´t get it to spin up with a few more tries, I might look at opening it up and try freeing up the heads.


Stuck heads don't usually make any noise. I suspect what you're hearing might be what's called the click-of-death. If so, then the drive is dead. Opening it up isn't going to help.
 
Suprised its not a Seagate Drive....

Yea, the minute you see, unplug, cool down, and back that sucker up. Unless you know what you are truly doing, and have done hdd repairs, avoid opening anything up. Just try to salvage data when the drive responds.
 
yea last time i had a drive doing that it failed completely a short time latter....and by then it was impossible to backup...so do it asap if there is data needing saved
 
I tried that , hot swapping the sata and the power cable , different sata headers etc , I will be trying a few more times , Opening it will be the very last straw.


PliotronX This is´nt the boot drive , it´s just a slave 2tb used for media, but yeah as i was saying , I´m struggling to get this sucker even running to pull the data off of it.
Dang sorry bud. I had the freezer trick work on two older drives capacities of 120GB but it has not worked in the age of multi TB for me. Might be worth trying but I dont think it will allow copying enough in the 20 minutes before it returns to room temperature so you have to know where the most important files are to get them off and leave the rest.
 
I've had good luck backing up with a Linux live cd in these instances. It does a much better job picking up where it left off if the drive locks up and you need to power cycle it. You may need to do some terminal shenanigans to unmount \ remount with the same name. (normally I don't need to, but had this happen recently. Not sure if it was distro related or the external adapter I was using. )
 
I've had good luck backing up with a Linux live cd in these instances. It does a much better job picking up where it left off if the drive locks up and you need to power cycle it. You may need to do some terminal shenanigans to unmount \ remount with the same name. (normally I don't need to, but had this happen recently. Not sure if it was distro related or the external adapter I was using. )
Good call, linux was the only way I could pull data from an Intel SSD that went into read only. The drive merely being connected would lock up windows (a condition I colloquially named poison drive).
 
curious question what does the below command show when you have that drive in the system
wmic diskdriver get status
 
First, back up your data if you haven't already. Then run an extended test using WD's diagnostic utility.


The reallocation event count is still 0. So I wouldn't freak out over this just yet. C6 just means that the drive encountered 9 sectors that couldn't be read correctly and the embedded ECC data couldn't fix them. There's probably a dozen different reasons why that might happen. So it's not necessarily indicative of a bad drive. C5 means that the drive is waiting until those sectors are read again to determine if they are truly un-correctable. If they are, then they'll be remapped and C4 will increment. If not, then C5 (and I think C6) will just go down. If those numbers start climbing, then there's a problem. If not, then you're good. But still back up your data.

What you said is accurate, I just want to add and emphasize that in my experience C5 and C6 errors are a very good indicator that a mechanical drive is dying. In my view, a drive generating those needs to be taken out of service ASAP. Almost all of the situations that can lead to those types of errors are ones that only get worse rather than stabilize, and the drive's condition tends go downhill fast.

The only time I'll use a drive after it has reached caution status in CD is if temperature (C2) was the reason for the status. That can be caused by things that have nothing to do with the drive itself and is easily remedied. Everything else basically means get your data off immediately and send the drive to the firing range, because it is done.
 
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