Hard drive accessible but extremely slow (and lots of other problems)

[05harrism]

Hi, I've been having a series of problems with an old HDD. At first I got the error "AHCI port0 device error" and the computer wouldn't boot. I created a recovery USB and reinstalled Windows 10 onto a spare HDD I had lying around and it now boots fine to the new disk.

The weird thing is that with both HDDs connected, it takes a long time to boot up and then when it does, Windows Explorer can access the old HDD and even run some programs it has on it. However it takes a long time to do anything and if I try and access my user profile (where the vast majority of my data is) it just sits there with the progress bar stuck at ~95% (at least for 30 mins, that's the longest I've left it so far).

I've tried running chkdsk on it and initially it insists that the drive is being used and so will run chkdsk on the next startup. Restarting brings up chkdsk but it immediately goes to 100% complete and then boots like normal. Disk Management seems to think that everything is fine and healthy and running the scan function from the drive's properties menu just freezes and doesn't do anything.

In a separate but related note, before I tried resurrecting the old HDD, I tried restoring a Windows system image from a month ago onto the new HDD from an external hard drive. I loaded up recovery options through the recovery drive and got all the way to the point where it starts restoring and then was met with the error "volume id not found 0x80070495".

I've had a look around to see if I can find any solutions and have got the furthest with one that suggested running the restore command from the command line. However upon following the steps in Geeks on Wheels post (https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/fa5b51fa-9e65-4121-b0bf-db5d1a15b620/sbs2008-standard-complete-pc-restore-failed-with-0x80070495?forum=windowsbackup) I get to the last step before it says something about "the path cannot be found" for the C: drive and the recovery drive E: . After this the solutions get too technical for me, hence why I then tried to get back the original HDD. Any layman's answer to this would be appreciated.

So ideally I would like to get the old HDD working again, at least long enough to try and make another backup and failing that, does anyone have any tips on how to get my system image working?

 

[05harrism]

Currently copying the contents of my system image over to my new HDD using your method, so thanks very much. I'll say solved for now although I am still struggling to try and access my old HDD so I may post back in here if I can't get that to work.

 

[BadAsAl]

Currently copying the contents of my system image over to my new HDD using your method, so thanks very much. I'll say solved for now although I am still struggling to try and access my old HDD so I may post back in here if I can't get that to work.

Glad to hear you were able to get into your system image. You are way ahead of a lot of people who didn't do a backup ever.

Look into creating a Linux Live CD or USB. You boot to it and it has a much better chance of seeing your data on the failed drive (attach it to the spare SATA port before you boot). I have used this successfully many times. You can copy to your new drive or have the backup drive attached and copy the stuff there if you are lucky enough to see it.
If this doesn't work then we can look at other techniques to get at the data.

Oh and don't forget to detach the VHD image once you are done copying. From Disk Management, just right click on the Disk (not the partition, but where it says Disk 1 for example, on the left) and select detach VHD.

 

[05harrism]

Currently copying the contents of my system image over to my new HDD using your method, so thanks very much. I'll say solved for now although I am still struggling to try and access my old HDD so I may post back in here if I can't get that to work.

Glad to hear you were able to get into your system image. You are way ahead of a lot of people who didn't do a backup ever.

Look into creating a Linux Live CD or USB. You boot to it and it has a much better chance of seeing your data on the failed drive (attach it to the spare SATA port before you boot). I have used this successfully many times. You can copy to your new drive or have the backup drive attached and copy the stuff there if you are lucky enough to see it.
If this doesn't work then we can look at other techniques to get at the data.

Oh and don't forget to detach the VHD image once you are done copying. From Disk Management, just right click on the Disk (not the partition, but where it says Disk 1 for example, on the left) and select detach VHD.

I left the old HDD trying to access my user profile overnight and by morning it had finally decided to load up. So I've managed to transfer essentially everything that wasn't in the system image over to the new HDD. I'll certainly keep in mind your suggestion about LiLi for the future though. Thanks for all your help with this.