Hard drive suddenly showing up as a DVD Drive, probably damaged disk?

Coltin

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May 26, 2009
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Running Windows 7, I have some recovery USB Linux Drives I can run, and a Mac Pro at my disposal.

TLDR: One of my hard disks is not accessible and I'm hoping to at least recover the data from it if possible. I'm open to any advice on what to try before taking it to a pro.

When I booted my computer yesterday it took 5 minutes to start, compared to the expected 20~ seconds. Later I realized that one of my hard drives was not showing up under "My Computer" as a "Hard Disk Drive" but as a "Devices with Removable Storage" labeled as "DVD Drive (G:)". Normally this is a 2TB hard drive.

Disconnecting all the drives but my main one (C:/) the computer boots very fast as expected. If I reconnect the 2TB Seagate drive as well it takes forever to boot. I assume it's trying to read information from the drive and either it has become slow, or there is some corruption requiring it to do extra work to try and read it.

Loading "Disk Management" likewise takes about 5-10 minutes to load when this disk is connected. When it does load it asks me to initialize the disk (which I don't do because it would format it), and the disk shows up only as 3.86GB of unallocated space.

I've run a number of disk analyzer tools. ActiveSmart was unable to see the disk entirely. Same with Recuva. Seagates SeaTools was unable to see the disk. I can see it with "Partition Find and Mount" but the "Intelligent scan" and "normal scan" didn't find any partitions. It didn't find any on my working hard drives either. It shows up as "4 GB" here as well.

I ran a few utilities on "System Rescue CD Linux" and was able to find the disk, but it also shows up at 3.8Gb with no partitions on it.

I was able to run DiskCheckup and it can see the disks SMART information which you can see here. http://pastebin.com/D4wiq6w1

In particular I believe it's getting incorrect Disk Geometry since it only reports 503 Cylinders; which is way too low. The sectors*size does give what everyone is reporting; 3.86Gb, so I think the issue is somewhere along this part being screwed up. However this is where the trail goes cold for me, I'm not sure what else I can do to diagnose what the issue is and hopefully recover the data.

The drive doesn't make any weird noise and sounds how it has always sounds. There is no whirring or whining. All my other disks work fine. I have tried swapping out the SATA cables with all the drives that work, and also giving it different power connectors. I have also plugged it into different SATA ports just in case.

EDIT 1: Running Seagates File Recovery they do see the drive. When I did a scan (it still only saw 3.86GB) it popped up a notification saying "The drive is experiencing too many read errors or its performance is below acceptable for logical recovery. In order to prevent further damage we strongly recommend cancelling scan process, shutdown the computer, unplug the drive, and opt for in-lab Seagate Recover Services".
 
Solution
Ok, having re-read everything, and testdisk not being able to access it... I would seriously consider taking it to professionals at this stage. It sounds like there is a hardware fault, in that various recovery software only see 3.86GB - I would worry that the rest of the 2TB just isn't physically accessable. Meaning a software recovery would just never work.
I had hoped that it was just some corruption in the file allocation table leading to this 4GB, I would now suspect it to be hardware related. To avoid further possible damage, I'd bit the bullet and start getting quotations.

ktolo

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Jul 19, 2012
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I recently saved a colleague's external harddrive using a little utility called Test Disk.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

It's command line..so it looks and feels like it's from 1984 - but it worked for me when other programs couldn't even access the disk to recover it.

You'll need somewhere to dump the data to. You can't use the source disk as the destination disk. So you'll need another disk at least 2TB in size.
Once you have your data back.. you could try reformatting the original one. It could be a corrupted file system rather than actual physical damage.

Good luck!
 

Coltin

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Thanks for the comment! Unfortunately it looks like testdisk requires the correct disk size to be displayed, otherwise it won't work. Perhaps I can mess around with the "Disk Geometry" and trick it into working :p
 

ktolo

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Jul 19, 2012
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Ok, having re-read everything, and testdisk not being able to access it... I would seriously consider taking it to professionals at this stage. It sounds like there is a hardware fault, in that various recovery software only see 3.86GB - I would worry that the rest of the 2TB just isn't physically accessable. Meaning a software recovery would just never work.
I had hoped that it was just some corruption in the file allocation table leading to this 4GB, I would now suspect it to be hardware related. To avoid further possible damage, I'd bit the bullet and start getting quotations.
 
Solution

Coltin

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Dang I was hoping nobody would actually say that :) Thanks for your help and taking the time to review my issue!