Hard drive recovery possible?

G

gregster

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Dec 16, 2009
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My Seagate 1.5TB 7200.11 seems to have died quickly, and before I realized what was going on the drive is only detected in the BIOS, and trying to access anything just gives me IO errors.

Is there anything else I could try? I have it backed up with the exception of 10GB or so of new data that wasn't caught by the nightly backup. I suppose the only other method would be to replace the controller. I did try the freezer trick for about 8 hours but it didn't seem to help.
 
Yes, as long as its detected in the BIOS.

You can try spinrite, to recover the sectors. A more dangerous method is to zero-write specific sectors to fix the damage; but then you have data loss too perhaps not being able to recover your data.

Assuming the damage is only surface damage on some key sectors, spinrite can fix that.
 
I will give Spinrite a try again, but I believe it told me that the partition was bigger than the drive size and that it couldn't proceed? I'm not sure if the filesystem being XFS is hindering things.
 
+1 for spinrite

If it doesnt work try HDDRegenerator
 
Tried Spinrite, it couldn't access all the sectors and refused to work. I booted from a Linux Recovery CD and ran Testdisk, which was able to find the partition and all. I think my next approach will be to use ddrescue to copy everything over at the bit level (it nulls bad sectors) to the replacement 1.5TB, and if I can get that off then I think I will be able to repair the fs (if needed) and copy the data from there. And after that...transfer all of it over to a WD Black instead. ;)
 
Yes that would be a good procedure, just make sure you use dd on the right disks and not the other way around. ;-)
 
It seems to have gotten to the point that the drive is no longer detected by fdisk or given a location under /dev/. I think I might be out of luck.
 
You may still try Spinrite. Spinrite doesn't work on all motherboards, if that was your earlier problem try using it on other systems, especially older ones may work still.
 
Spinrite didn't work, but after a lot of time, it finally toggled down to a DMA mode that could work, and I'm copying data off of it using ddrescue, albeit ever so slowly. Up to 35GB, with fingers crossed.
 
I got all the data off, except for about 80MB. I believe the partition table must be corrupted, as Linux is not able to see it, but testdisk is able to find it. I guess the next step is to allow testdisk to overwrite it? xfs_repair was not able to find the superblock etc, but I suppose if the partition is damaged that would explain it...
 
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