Failed Disk Drive...

[sportwarrior]

This is more a frustration post than anything, as I'm 99% sure I've lost at least 700gigs of data... but here it goes...

I was on my desktop not 30 minutes ago, watching a digital copy of a movie and messing around on photoshop... Suddenly, my computer shuts down as if I'd hit "Shut Down" under the start menu. Everything is orderly, no errors pop up, and the computer turns off. "Odd," I think to myself, because it seemed to shut down right when I sneezed. Obviously nothing to do with what happened, but weird.

So I restart and attempt to navigate to my 1 tb storage drive (mapped to D... and D: drive is missing entirely. Only C: and E: are listed. I go into Disk Management, and it lists my 1TB drive as "Missing" with a status of "Failed." Now, again, I know this probably means I'm up a terrible smelling creek, but I since I'm not an ace at file management or recovery I thought maybe possibly there was some slim chance I might be able to fix or recover data.

This drive was working perfectly well for 2 years before this failure. It's a WD Black 1TB. Now it's sitting here failed. BIOS detects it and Windows knows its there but can't use it. Is there some sort of bootable chkdsk utility I can use to try and repair bad sectors or something? Is there anything I can do? If I need to give you more info, please just tell me and I'll do my best to give it. I don't think there was anything terribly important that I hadn't backed up from that drive, but there is an awful lot of stuff that would be a terrible inconvenience to lose. Please.... any help?

 

[sportwarrior]

A few more notes... The disk does show up in Device Manager. Under the General tab, it is reported as working properly. The Volumes tab, however, contains no information. When I click on the properties for the underlying dynamic disk in Disk Management, it again reports as functioning properly. Under Volumes however, it lists the status as invalid with 0MB capacity. No idea if any of this helps. Basically just a hail mary at this point.

 

[scaarbelly]

If you can get it to load gets your files off ASAP. Google and you should be able to find some free tools that might be able to recover your data, sorry I don't remember which ones off hand.

You should always keep a backups.

 

[Jim G]

We've had some luck from time to time using Linux's ddrescue/gddrescue to get files off otherwise-dead hard drives... managed to rescue 99% of the files off a 750GB Seagate that died once that Windows couldn't see at all. Could be worth a shot.

 

[drescherjm]

I second the ddrescue recommendation. I use this at work for recovery for my department.

 

[sportwarrior]

I'll have to give this a shot. I need a replacement drive first, though. Is it difficult to use? I did a quick glance through some instructions but that was a few days ago...

 

[drescherjm]

I would say its pretty easy. The only real difficulty is to figure out what the source and destination drives are. Remember in linux there are no drive letters.

Instead of c: d: ... you have devices. /dev/sda /dev/sdb ...

However I caution you that the order you see in windows for drive letters need not apply to linux. So before you use any of these utilities identify what the source and destination are.

To help with that type

fdisk -l /dev/sd?

on the console and this will show you the partition tables of all detected drives.

You can also use hdparm -I /dev/sda

or

smartctl --all /dev/sda

to look at drive serial #s

replace /dev/sda with the other devices..