How do I fix external hard disk that is still partially working?

[aruwin]

Hi, everyone.

My external hard disk is still quite new as I have only been using it for about 1 year and a half on a daily basis.
One day, while I was transferring bulk files from the external hard disk onto my cloud drive, the hard disk suddenly failed and was disconnected from the computer despite the cable was still connected to the usb port. I literally didn't touch it and I was even away from the desk while the files were transferring.
And ever since that incident, the hard disk runs very slow and some of the video files are not playable anymore! Look, as you can see, the ones with the thumbnails are now unable to be opened while the ones with thumbnails are still okay. How can I get them all to be fixed?


[Attachment 56196 - Click to enlarge]

[poisondeathray]

First thing to do is stop writing to that disk

Make sure port is not faulty, and cable is firmly attached both ends. If external drive has power source, make sure cable is secure. Also try another usb port

Sometimes windows can repair it , with disk properties => tools => error checking . It will scan and give you options to attempt to fix. But there are cases where this can make it worse. It's rare, but I've seen it happen.

You can try partition or "recovery" software . There are dozens out there, commercial and free. A good one IMO is R-Studio. If anything is semi-important I would jump straight to that.

Otherwise there are professional recovery services, where you send them the drive. They cost more but are your best bet if there are important contents

[ProWo]

Make a full drive image first, with drivesnapshot g.e.
Than execute chkdsk x: /f (where x is your drive letter) into a windows command line box.

[aruwin]

Thanks for the advices, guys! Right now I am scanning my hard disk using the demo version of R-Studio. My external hard disk is 2TB and it's almost full too and hence the scanning is taking forever. It is estimated that the scan will be running for about 18 hours!

[Ennio]

Maybe you are "lucky" and the fault is in the interface (hardware print) between the internal harddrive itself and the external output.
If all fails, you could try to (gently) pry the case open, take out the harddrive itself and connect it otherwise to the pc.
I managed to rescue data this way a couple of times.

[poisondeathray]

Thanks for the advices, guys! Right now I am scanning my hard disk using the demo version of R-Studio. My external hard disk is 2TB and it's almost full too and hence the scanning is taking forever. It is estimated that the scan will be running for about 18 hours!

r-studio is slow , but it's very thorough . You can image the disk with it. If you've already started scanning, don't forget to save the results of the scan first (to a different disk, obviously). You need another HDD or lots of room to place the disk image and/or recovered files

I've had dozens of bad external drives over the years, and tried many "at home" products (when not sending the drive in). r-studio is by far the best one IMO

[abolibibelot]

@poisondeathray

Make sure port is not faulty, and cable is firmly attached both ends. If external drive has power source, make sure cable is secure. Also try another usb port

Better : if possible (some USB enclosed HDDs don't allow it because the USB connector is directly soldered to the drive's PCB) remove the HDD from its enclosure and plug it directly to the motherboard in SATA.

Sometimes windows can repair it , with disk properties => tools => error checking . It will scan and give you options to attempt to fix. But there are cases where this can make it worse. It's rare, but I've seen it happen.

Yes indeed : never use CHKDSK on a drive which might have physical issues. (And even for strictly logical issues that “black box” of a tool can seriously wreak havoc.)

You can try partition or "recovery" software . There are dozens out there, commercial and free. A good one IMO is R-Studio. If anything is semi-important I would jump straight to that.

When it comes to data recovery, never try dozens of things that are “out there” which you haven't thoroughly tested before and trust 100%.
R-Studio is good indeed, but you (the O.P. or anyone in that situation) should NOT use it to scan a faulty drive. Why ? During the scan, which can last hours, especially if there are bad sectors or even bad head(s), which can severely reduce the average reading rate, not a single byte is actually recovered, while the strain accumulates and the initial issue is likely to worsen.
If anything is important, don't jump on anything — staying calm and collected and being extra careful at each step of the process is paramount. Knowing your limits, too.

Otherwise there are professional recovery services, where you send them the drive. They cost more but are your best bet if there are important contents

Indeed, depending on the situation it may be the most or perhaps the only efficient course of action.
For a more thourough / informed diagnosis, you could ask about this case at : forum.hddguru.com (if someone cares to reply... the regular members who are actual data recovery professionals tend to be grumpy with the newbies — especially if the drive mentioned happens to be a Seagate).

@ProWo

Make a full drive image first, with drivesnapshot g.e.
Than execute chkdsk x: /f (where x is your drive letter) into a windows command line box.

Make a full drive image, yes, but there are tools dedicated to dealing with faulty drives which should be preferred, namely : ddrescue, HDDSuperClone. Both run on Linux (which should be preferred for data recovery purposes anyway, as Windows insists on mounting drives automatically and reading partitions, even writing on them without any request from or notice to the user sometimes), both are free (HDDSC has a “pro” version with extra features but the free version is fully functional), both are included in this custom Linux ISO (made by the author of HDDC, who goes by the nickname “maximus” on the HDDGuru forum).
Again, only use CHKDSK if a full image or clone (image = device to file, clone = device to device) could be performed, and if it could be ascertained that the failure is a strictly logical one.

@aruwin

Thanks for the advices, guys! Right now I am scanning my hard disk using the demo version of R-Studio. My external hard disk is 2TB and it's almost full too and hence the scanning is taking forever. It is estimated that the scan will be running for about 18 hours!

That's why you shouldn't do that, see above. A complete scan of a healthy 2TB HDD shoudn't take more than 5 hours (in SATA or USB 3), if it's that much more, something's fishy (and/or it's connected in USB 2 which would be one more reason to remove it from its enclosure).
First thing to check is the SMART status (with either CrystalDiskInfo, HDTune, HD Sentinel on Windows, gSMARTControl on Linux, any other software that gives access to that data, R-Studio for instance does have a SMART tab). It's quick and harmless. Chances are that you have quite a few — possibly quite many — “reallocated sectors” or “pending sectors” (as a rule of thumb : more than 10 is serious, more than 100 is very serious, more than 1000 is recipe for disaster), and every time the computer tries to read one of them, those numbers might increase (or the bad head's condition might worsen, to the point where it can go from barely being able to read at a slow rate to not being able to read anything at all).
Based on the fact that some large files appear readable and some others appear unreadable, chances are that one read/write head is failing or has failed altogether. That's bad, and that's not something you can fix with “D.I.Y.” methods.
Again, the most you can safely do is 1) check the SMART status ; 2) attempt to clone or image the drive with the aforementioned dedicated tools. If one head is failing it will look like this (see the screenshots) ; this was a 4TB HDD I took care of for someone, one head started failing about midway through the imaging, which resulted in some files being corrupted, but luckily most of the owner's personal files could be fully recovered, affected files were mostly downloaded movies.

@Ennio

Maybe you are "lucky" and the fault is in the interface (hardware print) between the internal harddrive itself and the external output.
If all fails, you could try to (gently) pry the case open, take out the harddrive itself and connect it otherwise to the pc.
I managed to rescue data this way a couple of times.

Indeed this would be the first thing to try in case of failure with an external HDD, but unfortunately this wouldn't account for the fact that some files are still readable with this unit.

@poisondeathray

r-studio is slow , but it's very thorough . You can image the disk with it. If you've already started scanning, don't forget to save the results of the scan first (to a different disk, obviously). You need another HDD or lots of room to place the disk image and/or recovered files

Again, R-Studio should NOT be used directly on a faulty drive. First do a clone / image as complete as possible, then run R-Studio on that clone / image. (Other softwares which are often recommended at forum.hddguru.com are : DMDE, UFS Explorer — I know DMDE, which is also very good, but have no experience with UFS Explorer.)

[poisondeathray]

@poisondeathray

r-studio is slow , but it's very thorough . You can image the disk with it. If you've already started scanning, don't forget to save the results of the scan first (to a different disk, obviously). You need another HDD or lots of room to place the disk image and/or recovered files

Again, R-Studio should NOT be used directly on a faulty drive. First do a clone / image as complete as possible, then run R-Studio on that clone / image. (Other softwares which are often recommended at forum.hddguru.com are : DMDE, UFS Explorer — I know DMDE, which is also very good, but have no experience with UFS Explorer.)

R-studio makes an image, but it sounded like the OP started scanning first

Are you recommending other tools than r-studio for the image ?

I compared r-studio to a few other tools, and the disc image was more complete. I didn't try DMDE or UFS Explorer, just a few commercial ones

[abolibibelot]

R-studio makes an image, but it sounded like the OP started scanning first

R-Studio can create a drive image but 1) you didn't specify that when recommending it ; 2) by default it uses a proprietary format (“byte by byte” must be specified to get a regular image which can be mounted or analysed by other utilities) ; 3) more importantly, it is not designed to deal with bad sectors in an efficient way, like the two tools I mentioned, which both proceed in several distinct passes, the first being meant to copy the “good data” (i.e. the sectors that are relatively easy to read) as fast as possible, completely bypassing bad areas as soon as they are encountered (since insisting on reading the bad areas tends to degrade the drive's condition very quickly), keeping track of which intervals of sectors were recovered and bypassed in a log file (that way if the drive is deconnected — as it happened initially with this one — it can be resumed from where it left off, whereas with most other imaging tools it has to be started all over again), then in subsequent steps attempting to read further and further into those defective areas (which can be defective either because of media damage, like scratches on the platters, or random bad sectors due to a weakening of the magnetic coat, or because of a head failure, in which case large chunks of thousands of sectors all over the surface will be unreadable or very very slow to read — unless the “head stack assembly” gets replaced, which can't be done at home), both forward and in reverse (forcing the drive to read in reverse can improve the readability although it's much slower, and it allows to move as close as possible to a bad area from both sides).

Are you recommending other tools than r-studio for the image ?

I recommended two tools, for a D.I.Y. attempt at recovering a failing HDD, knowing the risks involved (if it fails, then a subsequent professional data recovery might be far less successful than it would have been if that option had been chosen first), again : ddrescue (command line only) and HDDSuperClone (used to be CLI but now the GUI version seems more advanced). Beyond that are hardware / software dedicated professional imagers, with 4-digit price tags, never seen one in action (it's quite humbling when you think you have a pretty good grasp of such a technical field and then get a glimpse of how actual professionals proceed and how staggering the knowledge gap is to get there).

I compared r-studio to a few other tools, and the disc image was more complete. I didn't try DMDE or UFS Explorer, just a few commercial ones

Not sure what you mean by “the disc image was more complete”. Any decent tool which can create a drive image should produce the exact same image file with the same source device. Unless by “disc image” you mean the data analysis of the drive, i.e. the file/folder tree that is shown at the end of the scan (which analyses the filesystem and searches for file signatures), but then again this should not be attempted directly on a faulty drive.


EDIT : By the way, do you (anyone) see the screenshots on this page ? Since I returned on that forum a few days ago, pictures are not displayed on some topics, seemingly blocked by Firefox, which reports the website as “containing malicious software”... (Reported the issue there, got no feedback.)

[poisondeathray]

3) more importantly, it is not designed to deal with bad sectors in an efficient way, like the two tools I mentioned, which both proceed in several distinct passes, the first being meant to copy the “good data” (i.e. the sectors that are relatively easy to read) as fast as possible, completely bypassing bad areas as soon as they are encountered (since insisting on reading the bad areas tends to degrade the drive's condition very quickly), keeping track of which intervals of sectors were recovered and bypassed in a log file (that way if the drive is deconnected — as it happened initially with this one — it can be resumed from where it left off, whereas with most other imaging tools it has to be started all over again), then in subsequent steps attempting to read further and further into those defective areas (which can be defective either because of media damage, like scratches on the platters, or random bad sectors due to a weakening of the magnetic coat, or because of a head failure, in which case large chunks of thousands of sectors all over the surface will be unreadable or very very slow to read — unless the “head stack assembly” gets replaced, which can't be done at home), both forward and in reverse (forcing the drive to read in reverse can improve the readability although it's much slower, and it allows to move as close as possible to a bad area from both sides).

I recommended two tools, for a D.I.Y. attempt at recovering a failing HDD, knowing the risks involved (if it fails, then a subsequent professional data recovery might be far less successful than it would have been if that option had been chosen first), again : ddrescue (command line only) and HDDSuperClone (used to be CLI but now the GUI version seems more advanced). Beyond that are hardware / software dedicated professional imagers, with 4-digit price tags, never seen one in action (it's quite humbling when you think you have a pretty good grasp of such a technical field and then get a glimpse of how actual professionals proceed and how staggering the knowledge gap is to get there).

Good info there. I might try those 2 next time

I only experiment not important stuff. I have backups for everything else semi-important

I compared r-studio to a few other tools, and the disc image was more complete. I didn't try DMDE or UFS Explorer, just a few commercial ones

Not sure what you mean by “the disc image was more complete”. Any decent tool which can create a drive image should produce the exact same image file with the same source device. Unless by “disc image” you mean the data analysis of the drive, i.e. the file/folder tree that is shown at the end of the scan (which analyses the filesystem and searches for file signatures), but then again this should not be attempted directly on a faulty drive.

I'm not talking about the data analysis after the image. The disc images were not the same - my theory was that some damaged HDD's could only be partially readable by some tools . It's a bad start if you begin with a bad image / more missing info

[abolibibelot]

I'm not talking about the data analysis after the image. The disc images were not the same - my theory was that some damaged HDD's could only be partially readable by some tools .

Difficult to assess since each imaging attempt was made on the same drive but not in the same condition, i.e. each attempt (which strained the drive for hours) may have degraded its condition further, so if R-Studio got a shot at it first it is to be expected that it fared better than the others. Or it could have been an unstable drive which for some reason happened to behave a bit better when imaged by R-Studio. Otherwise, as far as I know, it doesn't do anything fancy beyond reading sectors from the source and writing them to the destination in sequential order. Or perhaps it does have a rudimentary bad sector skipping algorithm, while other tools insist on reading the first bad sector they encounter and give up as they fail ? The answer is su**ing co**s in the wind — sorry : the answer is blowing in the wind...

[poisondeathray]

I'm not talking about the data analysis after the image. The disc images were not the same - my theory was that some damaged HDD's could only be partially readable by some tools .

Difficult to assess since each imaging attempt was made on the same drive but not in the same condition, i.e. each attempt (which strained the drive for hours) may have degraded its condition further, so if R-Studio got a shot at it first it is to be expected that it fared better than the others. Or it could have been an unstable drive which for some reason happened to behave a bit better when imaged by R-Studio. Otherwise, as far as I know, it doesn't do anything fancy beyond reading sectors from the source and writing them to the destination in sequential order. Or perhaps it does have a rudimentary bad sector skipping algorithm, while other tools insist on reading the first bad sector they encounter and give up as they fail ? The answer is su**ing co**s in the wind — sorry : the answer is blowing in the wind...

Not sure of the mechanism or why ... that could be a possible explanation, but I definitely used it afterwards/later in the testing sequence on at least 3 of the drives (maybe more). I know, I know, small sample size, limited observation... It "feels" like it's doing something more fancy - It seems like it was able to read more of those drives, producing a more complete image . Or it could be some of the commercialware titles are junk, maybe they abort early, not sure

(Some of them are the same repackaged junk. They even have the same GUI, same colors, just different name (!) . Incredible )

[abolibibelot]

So... is the O.P. still around ? How did the situation evolve ? (Some people are more persistent than others.)

[abolibibelot]

(Back from that other thread.)

I just copied directly from the HDD onto my desktop as usual without using any tools/software.
The HDD is still partially working. It takes a long time to load and when it's done loading only a portion of files can be played (all the files on the HDD are media files btw).
Yes, I read all the replies in the other thread but it's a bit hard for me to follow.
I did a scanning with R-Studio but the results returned with 0 files.
I'm not confident enough to open the case myself. After opening the case, should we check the disc and see if there are scratches or it's displaced or something?

You should NOT attempt to open the drive's case yourself. Seriously. You would not be able to see what the problem is, it's way too damn small and you don't have the knowledge / experience to fix anything anyway (I wouldn't either) ; besides, opening a HDD in a regular environment means exposing its internal components to dust, which can seriously wreak havoc once the drive is powered up again (considering the level of miniaturization of modern HDDs, speckles of dust are like mountains that would rise suddenly in the middle of a highway while hundreds of cars are driving on it).
You have to decide if the files on that HDD are valuable enough to justify the cost of a professional data recovery service, or not. I don't know how much it would be in your area, but it would certainly be expensive, like 5 to 10 times the cost of the HDD itself. Yet this would be the best course of action, and would have been from the beginning, when the problem appeared. Whatever the problem is, anything you try on your own will be a shot in the dark at best and risk making the situation worse without recovering a single file (which is what happened with the R-Studio scan).
If you definitely can not or do not want to afford that, the only things you could do which would be relatively safe would be :
1) Check the SMART status, which is a self-assessment of various parameters which can be indicative of some types of failures. On Windows the easiest tool to do that would be CrystalDiskInfo : download it, then plug the problematic drive, then launch CrystalDiskInfo, select the name / model of that HDD, take a screenshot, post it here ; unplug the drive as soon as it is done, shouldn't take more than a couple minutes.
2) Depending on how bad the SMART status is and therefore how severe the issue is (typically : how many bad sectors have been detected), it may still be possible to do a clone (copy the whole contents of that drive to another drive of equal capacity) or create an image file (a single file which contains a copy of the entire device, or what could be actually read from it if the source device is defective, written to another device of higher capacity). I already mentioned the two best software tools available to attempt this kind of recovery at home : ddrescue, HDDSuperClone. Even that is quite hazardous and not so easy to do, so if you're not confident about doing it yourself, it would be better to wait until someone trustworthy is eager to help you for free or for a cheap fee.

[abolibibelot]

Oh, and apparently you had a similar issue 4 years ago, and yet you didn't learn the lesson(s)... é_è