[SOLVED] Dying HDD - will using a USB adaptor help data recovery?

[jameskirk]

My hard drive appears to be dying.

I have been attempting to recover sme data from it. I have a copy of windows on another drive but I am unable to start up this second windows while the broken drive is installed internally. The computer is unable to load past the motherboard splash screen, or it stops just after this goes blank. However the second hdd's windows starts up fine when i have not connected the dying hdd.

The dying hdd can work briefly and when it was the sole installed drive it managed to load up the screen with windows' offer to start up in safe mode but no further.

Would my chances of recovering data be improved by using a USB-HDD adaptor cable?

 

[TerryLaze]

Most probable no,it doesn't matter how it's connected if it's broken it will freeze up windows just the same.

You should get the dos testing software of your hard drive,check their website, or a general HDD testing software that can run under dos and run a diagnostic that way,if you are afraid that it could go any minute you should use ghost or some other cloning software that can boot on it's own from usb/cd and try to take an image of the whole disk.
Then copy this image and mount the image as a virtual drive under windows 10 and do all your testings and recovery attempts there.

 

[popatim]

It sounds like the PC might be booting off the wrong drive. When you have both connected, go into the bios and make sure it's selected the correct drive to boot from. Or you can use the boot option f-key during POST to select which drive to boot from. Which F-key it is will be shown att he same time you get the message to 'Press XYZ to Enter Setup' is shown at the bottom of your screen.

 

[USAFRet]

A USB dock might help, in that you can power up this affected drive after the rest of the system is running.

Data recovery? Depends on how it is broken.

 

[fzabkar]

What is the model of the HDD?

Some HDDs may hang the boot process when they remain Busy for too long. This is often due to house-keeping by the HDD firmware. For example, the HDD may be having difficulty retiring bad sectors after power-on, which means that it does not come Ready quickly enough for the BIOS or OS to detect it.

 

[jameskirk]

Thank you for your replies.

its a wd blue 2tb

I was able to bootup using my windows CD and used the command prompt to copy off the files. yay

as a result i have not bought an external usb adaptor

Appears windows must be doing something on all the Hdds causing it to freeze up

 

[jameskirk]

What is the model of the HDD?

Some HDDs may hang the boot process when they remain Busy for too long. This is often due to house-keeping by the HDD firmware. For example, the HDD may be having difficulty retiring bad sectors after power-on, which means that it does not come Ready quickly enough for the BIOS or OS to detect it.

I saw the hdd oracle article you posted in other thread about oxidizing in WD ones. Is the WD blue one of those affected?

 

[fzabkar]

I don't know.