• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Another dying hd thread. (with a twist?)

T

ThePengo

n00b
Joined
Aug 12, 2011
Messages
3
So a few months back I started putting my pc in a hybrid sleep to help with the heat level in my room at night. One day when I woke the pc up it came back up as it should but then started to hang up and then I got a grey screen. When I tried to restart my computer bios still showed the drive but windows took FOREVER to load. Once in windows it started to hang up for 10-30seconds at a time. Computer has been off until now.

Cut to now, finally got a replacement drive of the same size/type. Booted into acronis to try and clone, no dice. It thew out read errors when the cloning process began (direct r/w). It also sounded like the heads were not seeking anywhere. Next I thew it in my blacx and hooked it in my laptop to try it that way. When I plug it up the drive spins up like it should heads go nuts like they are seeking while the drivers are being loaded. Then I try to backup up the drive using acronis on my laptop. Get the same r/w errors and VERY sporadic head movement. The backup size gets to about 3gigs and stops.

At this point I'm thinking of trying the old freezer trick and praying. I had a crackpot idea though. After the drive is 'frozen', would it be worth trying to put it back in the dock and sticking the whole shebang back in the freezer and try to backup/clone with them both in there? Running wires from the freezer to my laptop. Hopefully getting more time out of the 'freeze'.
 
That'll work better than pulling from the freezer and going straight into a caddy. If you do that moisture in the air will condense on the drive & possibly short it out.

I've read about people doing exactly what you've described with some luck. Personally if a freezer jolt doesn't save it, i give up.
 
I've never used Acronis, so i'm not sure if it has any features to skip drive errors. But, if you were to use a Linux live CD maybe using dd with conv=noerror will help mirror the drive, skipping over the errors, to a state that the filesystem could eventually repair. Also, on Linux you can view the kernel log using dmesg to find out what is going on with the drive (what kind of errors are occurring).
 
I would recommend CloneZilla, its a livecd HDD cloning tool/imagining tool. i used it when i upgraded by laptops 250gb drive to a 500gb drive, bit for bit copy, and it worked great.
 
The freezer trick is for mechanical problems.

Generally if the drive is spinning and the arm/heads are working it's not a mechanical problem.

It won't help to put the drive and the dock in the freezer and the drive should be connected directly to the MB for any meaningful try at recovery.

Good Luck!
 
Trying clonezilla right now with the -rescue switch. Got to about 2.5% and I started getting 'cant read sector at...' Not too many sectors between errors it seems. Been going for a couple hours now....I thought I was screwed before but I still had a bit of hope. Hope that has all but evaporated. I wonder what I'll get and how long it will take if I just let it keep going >.>
 
I wonder what I'll get and how long it will take if I just let it keep going >.>
Click to expand...
Who knows?

But I wouldn't bother.

If the data wasn't worth backing-up it isn't worth the hassle.

If it was worth backing-up consider it a lesson learned. :)
 
ThePengo said:
Trying clonezilla right now with the -rescue switch. Got to about 2.5% and I started getting 'cant read sector at...' Not too many sectors between errors it seems. Been going for a couple hours now....I thought I was screwed before but I still had a bit of hope. Hope that has all but evaporated. I wonder what I'll get and how long it will take if I just let it keep going >.>
Click to expand...

In this case I would have used ddrescue to an identical or larger disk. This way the good data is copied first.
 
Was gonna try ddrescue when I got home. Though clonezilla finally finished up sometime while I was at work. Im back in windows now after windows went nuts with all the now invalid indexes, also ran sfc for good measure. So far so good *knock on wood*. Thanks for the suggestions/help guys. I really appreciate it.

PS
Clonezilla ftw
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top