[SOLVED] Dying Seagate 3TB HDD

[NateBeast]

So like 4 days ago my HDD wasn't showing up in Windows one time when I turned it on, so I shutdown, checked the cables and turned it on again and it showed up.

So I thought I was all good. Then it happened again, and was really slow to use. So I checked SMART with cryataldiskinfo and it said caution, for pending, uncorrectable and reallocated sectors. One was at like 700 and the other 2 were the exact same number, around 10k, don't remember which were which tho, sorry.

So I started copying my importabt files off the drive, and the 700 went up to 900 something during that time. Then, I used Macrium reflect to image 2 partitions on my HDD, F: and I:.

However, when I tried E:, I got error 6 MFT corrupt and it said to run chkdsk. I tried but it said I need to unmount it, which I did but at stage 4 it was insanely slow, like estimating 100 hours, so I cancelled it. But I did choose to do it on reboot. I rebooted once, and the drive didn't show up. Again and no drive in Windows. But the third time it showed up, so I tried a different file copier that works for broken drives. During this process the drive disappeared again.

I rebooted, and now it's in stage 4 of CHKDSK before it's in Windows, 338 of 331760 estimating 30 hours. Is there a point of letting this run, or should I just reboot. And what's the best course of action to save some of my data?

Seagate Seatools did say the drive passed SMART and Drive Self Test, but idk how that's possible...

Thanks for all the help!!

 

[InvalidError]

That's the JTAG connector. It is only used in manufacturing and development (and firmware hacking).

Beat me to it by a minute

In my drive's case, it is the head stack pads that looked like junk. Considerably more critical

Cleaning them didn't make any difference though. I'll try re-plating them later.

I have a hunch that the periodic head retractions are caused by a voltage regulator going out of spec under load - heads move, voltage dips, heads retract, voltage comes back up, rinse and repeat. Could also be over-current getting tripped if one of the caps related to the head driver or preamps is leaking too much current.

 

[fzabkar]

It could be that one head is weak and loses servo every now and then. If ddrescue's log shows regularly repeated error bands, then that would point to a bad head.

 

[InvalidError]

It could be that one head is weak and loses servo every now and then. If ddrescue's log shows regularly repeated error bands, then that would point to a bad head.

Wish I had a Linux PC I could put together on a whim to test that theory out, though the fact that I am making constant progress, however slow it may be, seems to indicate that all heads are working all of the time otherwise I'd have moments of no progress whatsoever as the HDD is re-attempting the same sectors over and over due to the head being out of commission.

2GB more to go and I'm done with the stuff I wanted to salvage if possible. No read timeouts or fails, just awfully slow at ~2MB/s average.

Using a lifetime worth of head load/unload cycles in a matter of hours, can't be good

Edit: Hm, whenever the drive hits a "stride" where it quits parking between reads, I can keep going at 36-37MB/s for as long as I keep the drive 100% busy. If I give it even a fraction of a second to be idle, it goes back to its park loop right away. This definitely looks like a voltage or current regulator having trouble settling to a steady state to me, not an intermittent head failure.