Failed 8,3 Years old WD Red drive 3TB (EFRX) - what now...?

M

Moratorium

n00b
Joined
Mar 14, 2017
Messages
42
Failed 8,3 Years old WD Red drive 3TB (EFRX) - what now...?

So couple of weeks/months ago one of my HDDs- WD Red 3TB - EFRX - 8,3 Years old (!) failed on me. I had backups and was still able to get vast majority of the data directly from the drive. So data-wise im ok.
My questions is other: What to do with the drive now...? I took several pictures from SMART and hdd tests etc. and im posting it here. HD Tune pro and other programs (MiniTool Partition Wizard) found damaged sectors on the drive. The copying from these sectors were even like 2 Kb per second speed wise :-D...

So what can i do with this drive now...? Can it be "saved" somehow? Can i "fix" the damage sectors somehow? Can i at least "mark them" so the HDD doesnt use them anymore... (and still use the drive)? Will the damaged sectors "spread"...?

It appears that like the 1st half of the drive, or even first 2 terabytes (out of three) are OK... Can i make new "partitions" on the drive and use the 1st partition somewhat safely , and do NOT use the 2nd one with the damages sectors...?

Like its a 3 TB drive, I dont wanna just throw it in trash like that...

Can i fix the drive somehow? Can i still use the drive somewhat reliably...? Or is the drive now good only for like a doorstop?

https://prnt.sc/jultghOArCkk
https://prnt.sc/aakBEpqLyRVY
https://prnt.sc/NHuRwUBvT3_n
https://prnt.sc/dVceUguoPDbD
https://prnt.sc/2xVf57TQXkTt
https://prnt.sc/5SXVMacnchHh
https://prnt.sc/QnfDFcHUzHdJ
https://prnt.sc/YQ4zwLsv6kiP
 
Hard drives require specialized tools and environments with a lot of expertise to work with.

I thought though that drives could mark sectors as bad in order for them not to be reused ?

I never throw hard drives away because I'm paranoid someone will find them and extract my data even if I wasn't able
 
blackmomba said:
Hard drives require specialized tools and environments with a lot of expertise to work with.

I thought though that drives could mark sectors as bad in order for them not to be reused ?

I never throw hard drives away because I'm paranoid someone will find them and extract my data even if I wasn't able
Click to expand...
I used a couple for shotgun slug targets before i threw mine away last time i had a couple go bad and not able to recover. I suppose someone could still extract something from it but i am a lot less worried.
 
If you write to the pending sectors, that might be what the drive firmware needs to move from pending to reallocated.

Personally, my threshold for bad/questionable sectors before I junk the drive is 10 if I'm not actively monitoring the drive, and 100 if I am. Sounds like you're not monitoring too closely, so I'd wipe it, and put in the box of drives to throw away, eventually.
 
Darunion said:
I used a couple for shotgun slug targets before i threw mine away last time i had a couple go bad and not able to recover. I suppose someone could still extract something from it but i am a lot less worried.
Click to expand...
Sounds like an episode of Mythbusters. Would've been cool if they made like a vest of hard drives for Ted the dummy to wear, see if they could stop bullets
 
CHKDSK C: /f /r from an admin command prompt. then dont use it for anything you value. or target practice if you dont trust it.
ps: its gonna take a really, really long time.


edited speeling
 
Last edited:
I was recommended elsewhere to do a full format under windows to see if these issues wont resolve themselves (there is a chance that they might) and than i could still use the drive (but only for nonessential data/as an additional backup drive for example etc). what do you think abotu this (full format under windows, these issues are still temporary and the full format might resolved them)...?
 
Moratorium said:
I was recommended elsewhere to do a full format under windows to see if these issues wont resolve themselves (there is a chance that they might) and than i could still use the drive (but only for nonessential data/as an additional backup drive for example etc). what do you think abotu this (full format under windows, these issues are still temporary and the full format might resolved them)...?
Click to expand...
you still need to scan it to find and mark the bad spots. then do a format. you could try the error check in windows, it is supposed to find them too, but ive never tried it.
1679444911215.png
 
An internet search says Windows full format will write to each sector, which is what you want to do.

Maybe let a smart full scan run after that. And cross your fingers. If the drive supports secure erase, that's probably better.
 
noooo, full format will not make the data unrecoverable.. it does write zeros (from Windows Vista on) but it is only one pass and data can still be recovered by certain software. Always physically destroy a drve or do atleast multiple passes of random instead of zeros
 
teletechtodd said:
noooo, full format will not make the data unrecoverable.. it does write zeros (from Windows Vista on) but it is only one pass and data can still be recovered by certain software. Always physically destroy a drve or do atleast multiple passes of random instead of zeros
Click to expand...
Not super concerned about making the data unrecoverable, just want to write to every sector so the disk firmware can decide if the sectors are good or not, and reallocate them if not. That said, one pass is really sufficient, as long as there's no data hanging out in spare sectors; no software is going to get back sectors that have been overwritten; maybe, especially with very old drives, you could get data back with hugely expensive techniques, but not just software if you write to every sector. An SSD, maybe you can get something back, because they've all got a lot of extra sectors, and sector mapping is part of normal operation, so you've got to write enough that all the physical sectors get erased and rewritten. That's a story for another day though, this person just wants to tempt fate and use their somewhat failing disk a little more.
 
Eventually drives run out of spare blocks, because there is only a limited amount reserved when the drives are manufactured. This reserved space is probably no different from the rest of the usable space and is reserved purely in software. It should be possible to increase it, but I don't know if anyone has figured out how to do that. Eventually people will. Of course, it could be a mechanical issue as well.

toast0, I think it's quite common knowledge that simply overwriting data with ones or zeroes on a magnetic drive is reversible. If you overwrite a 1 with a 0, it's probably going to appear differently than if you overwrite a 0 with a 0. Obviously, on the lowest level, the hard drive is an analog device, it's not seeing perfect ones and zeroes, it's seeing something very close to that, 0.99 or 0.01, the right software might be all it takes to recover such data.
 
ribcage said:
toast0, I think it's quite common knowledge that simply overwriting data with ones or zeroes on a magnetic drive is reversible. If you overwrite a 1 with a 0, it's probably going to appear differently than if you overwrite a 0 with a 0. Obviously, on the lowest level, the hard drive is an analog device, it's not seeing perfect ones and zeroes, it's seeing something very close to that, 0.99 or 0.01, the right software might be all it takes to recover such data.
Click to expand...

Common knowledge is wrong on this. There was a paper many many years ago, that invaded the collective conciousness, and was talking about older technology drives. It's a nice myth, but NIST sanitation only requires a single pass writing zeros to each sector. Anyway, even if there are usable traces of data, which I doubt on any drive that's not from the 80s or earlier, you're not goinf to be getting anything like that back with just software connected to the SATA port.

You most likely need a much more sensitive head, and a ton of time, effort, and money. Unless you have something immensely valuable on that drive, nobody is going to go through that trouble.

Of course, it's hard to prove a negative, but certainly, you can prove your case. Show me one example of any data being recovered in such a manner on a drive with SATA or IDE.

NIST says "For storage devices containing magnetic media, a single overwrite pass with a fixed pattern such as binary zeros typically hinders recovery of data even if state of the art laboratory techniques are applied to attempt to retrieve the data." At the top of page 7 https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-88r1.pdf
 
Even if one pass of zeros doesn't do it, another pass with 1s would cause much more damage, no?
 
The usual way of doing it is overwriting it multiple times, each time with different, random data. On Debian operating system, and probably many others, there is a program called "shred" which does just that, and it's manual page describes it this way: Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data.
 
diskpart > list disk > select disk X (make sure its the right disk number) > clean all (again make sure its the correct disk before pressing enter as this does not warn before zeroing out the whole drive, unless its a system drive)

monitor with smart as its wiping the drive (diskpart clean all zeros every sector)

HDD Sentinel i use a lot got smart tab and right click and select Decimal Data fields (log Tab will show when events are happening, registered version shows more then 10 logs so only be able to see recent events)
crystaldisk info > function > adv > Raw values > 10 {DEC] (shows numbers in decimal instead of hex)

once the clean all has finished (it will take hours) trigger a smart extended scan (hdd Sentinel > test > long test) see how it goes if drive is progressively getting worse (lots of relocations) as diskpart wipes its a throw away drive

if using a SSD do not use so called "secure erase" software on them (clean all zero fill with diskpart or Real ATA secure erase via synology nas or manufactures SSD tool if they have an option to erase them )
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top