Hard drive pauses during read, later disappears completely

[pstepanas]

On my PC system I have a number of hard drives, including a WD Green 3TB HDD bought in March 2013. There are no programs on this drive, it's all data, including backups of my music and DVD library.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that when copying one file the system would pause in the middle of reading it, spend a few minutes near that point, then continue. A bit later, some of my music would pause for 10s or so in the middle of playback.

Worried that the drive might have bad sectors developing, I ran chkdsk on it with the /R option. 72 hours later, Windows reported finding no problems with the drive.

However, immediately after that, the drive "disappeared". The drive letter still appears, but if I try to switch to that drive, the application hangs for a minute or so, then fails. Boot-up also takes ages (about 5 minutes). It reminds me of the days when Windows would keep trying to find a network drive that wasn't there.

Disk Management seems unable to load the disk configuration after 5 minutes. Hard Disk Sentinel also seems to not get past it's initial scan to provide a user interface.

So what is happening and what do I do?

It seems the hard drive is failing (has failed). There's a lot of data on there I don't have backups for (mainly all the DVD images). Could it be I just jostled one of the connectors when I was cleaning my video card (which stopped the black-screen crashes I was having near-daily)? Can I connect to a different computer and dump to a new HDD (which I'll have to find some cash for)? Or is the only option now expensive, professional data recovery?

Hoping for some good news.

 

[pstepanas]

More info: Disk Management (Windows 7 x64) eventually clocked in.
It lists the drive as "2794.39 GB RAW | Healthy (Primary Partition)"

WTH?

 

[seagate_surfer]

pstepanas, a troubleshooting step that is recommend is exactly what you suggested...try it on another computer to see what the results are. As for a backup, basically you want:

3 copies of any data you don't want to lose.
2 different mediums it's stored on (so 2 different drives in your computer, for example).
1 copy kept offsite, to prevent against disaster.

Best of luck.

 

[pstepanas]

As a private individual with a budget, it's difficult to buy large enough storage media for complete backups. I certainly back up my documents, but a lot of media is just too difficult, both to organise and to afford the terabytes.

I would still like to know what experts think the symptoms I've described most likely point to.

Specifically, is pausing during a read a sign of disc failure? Why would the drive "disappear" immediately after a full disc scan? Does the RAW indication in Disk Management suggest an Unformat might be needed for some reason?

Thank you.

 

[seagate_surfer]

pstepanas, what you are facing is an imminent drive failure. Seems you have lost a partition as it is in RAW format. If you would like to try to get that info back you may try Recuva.

 

[pstepanas]

Thanks for the suggestion. I've also asked at a few computer stores. The consensus looks a bit like this:
- Surface scan was the worst possible thing to do.
- Use power saving on data drives in the future, or a hot-swapping dock.
- Recuva is very risky for a whole volume (not sure why).
- OnTrack's Easy Recovery 6 has a free version that will recover up to 1GB of data (I first thought it was 1TB, but no).

My understanding is Recuva works on a per-file basis, so the Linux option may be better.

The other promising software I've found is Puran File Recovery, which has a full partition recovery mode.

Any suggestions? I'm hoping most of the file structure is still intact. I definitely don't need something that will stress the hard drive trying to reconnect fragments!

- Running Linux from a DVD may allow me to see all the files and try to copy them.

 

[pstepanas]

I know this thread is pretty old, but I thought I'd add one note.

I did replace the HDD, and I did manage to get everything safely off it using my Mum's Windows 10 PC. But there may have been another culprit.

There's a good chance my Power Supply has been part of the cause of my various problems over the last 2-3 years. Apparently, power supplies decay over time, so my 8 year old, non-brand PSU probably isn't delivering 800W any more -- more like 400W on a good day.

I'm upgrading most of my system right now, and the new PSU will be SilverStone!