My WD passport 1 TB external disk failure due to "Too many bad sectors detected"

[karthik24s]

Dear Experts,

I am holding one WD external hard disk past an year and suddenly (since last week) started facing few problems and today it ended up in something big as below.

When I plug the hard drive on my laptop, it got detected (7 success out of 10) and able to go till the document (say 3 nested folder). When I attempt to access (open/delete) that document, it resulted in an IO error or file access got stalled .

So far attempted:

- Attempted to copy that file (went fast into that folder) and copied to local harddisk (one in my laptop) and able to open and copy it. (Have to do it very fast [say suppose less than a minute])
- Attempted plugging hard drive in my friend laptop and observed same behavior (after a minute not able to access any folder or files )
- Changed the cable with original WD (friends WD cable with same spec) and observed same behavior
- Attempted to recover the files using Recuva software which resulted in an error "Unable to detect file system"
- Under disk management (10 out 7 times) able to see the FS type as NTFS and partition status as healthy.
- Attempted to do Windows disk cleanup - Failed (resulted in error saying format this disc)

Diagnostics :

- Ran the diagnostic software came with the WD Drive Utilities (Quick test Passed and extended test failed)
- Downloaded and ran "Data lifeguard diagnostic" which resulted in below error.

Test Option: EXTENDED TEST
Model Number: WD My Passport
Unit Serial Number:
Firmware Number: 1019
Capacity: 1000.17 GB
SMART Status: PASS
Test Result: FAIL
Test Error Code: 08-Too many bad sectors detected.
Test Time: 14:06:41, October 18, 2014

I still have the warranty and when I contacted WD support, they asked me to take the backup and attempt complete format of disk once before claim RMA.

Could someone help on below items:

- I am tired of copying file by doing plug in and plug out. Any easy hope here??
- Any other backup software could help on this regard?

Thanks in Advance.

 

[Agera One]

Nope, there are no other ways to copy the file. Back up as soon as possible before the drive completely fails and the data will become UNRECOVERABLE. No other software can help. replace the drive immediately.

 

[karthik24s]

Nope, there are no other ways to copy the file. Back up as soon as possible before the drive completely fails and the data will become UNRECOVERABLE. No other software can help. replace the drive immediately.

Thanks for the quick prompt. Any idea on copy , resume software avilable considering above scenario ?

Like Plug - copy start - fails - plug out /in- copy resume - plug out/in - copy resume - plug out/in - copy complete

Also, would be good if software checks the file integrity too ..

 

[Agera One]

If it fails during transferring the file would've been already corrupted. But programs to pause/resume transferring are "Supercopier" and "teracopy". Try these and see whether the files gets copied fully, otherwise corrupted.

 

[Agera One]

Experts recommend to run chkdsk command for HDD issues, as this command check and repairs bad sectors.

 

[karthik24s]

Experts recommend to run chkdsk command for HDD issues, as this command check and repairs bad sectors.

Could you please elaborate more how to initiate the chkdsk command and repair bad sectors ? If there is any direct software available I can use it ..

I am new to this stuff, so direct command can help to complete this job.. Before I post the previous message itself attempted "Filecopy", "SuperCopier", "WindMed", and few many but in almost all the case after 3 % of copy (19 times plugged out and plugged in) the time changed to infinite and resulted in stall

Currently, not sure what can be done.. It is almost 1 TB minus 100 GB of data in my hard drive and practically impossible to go folder by folder in a short period of time.

 

[Agera One]

Your name says you are from India. I'm Indian too.
Click start button and type "cmd".
Right click on it and select "Run as Administrator".
Type, chkdsk X: /r and press enter (where X is the letter assigned for that drive in windows explorer)

This might take over 15 hours to complete for 1 TB drive.

 

[karthik24s]

Your name says you are from India. I'm Indian too.
Click start button and type "cmd".
Right click on it and select "Run as Administrator".
Type, chkdsk X: /r and press enter (where X is the letter assigned for that drive in windows explorer)

This might take over 15 hours to complete for 1 TB drive.

Thanks.

I ran the provided command and it resulted in an error as below:

"Unable to determine volume version and state. CHKDSK aborted.

 

[Agera One]

The drive is really very bad.

 

[karthik24s]

The drive is really very bad.

Humm...

I would take this (that drive is really bad) as solution . Any way to temporarily access it ?

I just inserted the drive on my TV USB slot and able to play all the HD movies without any trouble which is annoying me and feeling hard to spend time in copying data by doing plug out and plug in.

Just feeling something is missing or went wrong and due to limited knowledge in this area not able to connect the dots :-( and copy software is not at all good for current situation . If I would have had the source code then would have attempted something new for my situation

 

[Agera One]

Hard disk drives has platters. Platters contain the clusters and each cluster has many sectors.

"For traditional hard disk drives (normal use hard drives), one sector is sized with 512 Bytes and one cluster is sized as 4 KB for NTFS format HDDs (HDDs with volume up to 16 TB). So, a file of certain (say 10 MB) will not be copied such that it fills cluster 1 then cluster 2 then cluster 3, etc. The HDD stores it randomly over the entire storage. (that's why the HDD platters spins while doing work, the needle detects where the data are stored along the rotating platters. So the needle takes more time to find the data when the HDD is spinning at 5400 pm and takes less time when spinning at 7200 rpm)."

Thus, a/set of damaged cluster/sectors not only makes a single file to corrupt or unreadable, makes other files dead too. Try connecting the hard drive to any other computer or laptop and copy the files you need. This is the last thing you've to do. No other temporary/easy way.

 

[karthik24s]

Hard disk drives has platters. Platters contain the clusters and each cluster has many sectors.

"For traditional hard disk drives (normal use hard drives), one sector is sized with 512 Bytes and one cluster is sized as 4 KB for NTFS format HDDs (HDDs with volume up to 16 TB). So, a file of certain (say 10 MB) will not be copied such that it fills cluster 1 then cluster 2 then cluster 3, etc. The HDD stores it randomly over the entire storage. (that's why the HDD platters spins while doing work, the needle detects where the data are stored along the rotating platters. So the needle takes more time to find the data when the HDD is spinning at 5400 pm and takes less time when spinning at 7200 rpm)."

Thus, a/set of damaged cluster/sectors not only makes a single file to corrupt or unreadable, makes other files dead too. Try connecting the hard drive to any other computer or laptop and copy the files you need. This is the last thing you've to do. No other temporary/easy way.

Thanks. I understand .

But, any idea why my harddisk is perfectly working on TV ? when I say "perfect" could able to play all the vidoes and pictures without any lag or anything as in trouble.

If the above theory stand still as true, in that case it is applicable for all media read devices right ?

So only asked if anything is missing from technical perspective which can be recovered through some software.

 

[Agera One]

Try what happens in other system/laptop. If it works there, take a back-up quick. Then full format (zero fill) the drive.
If not, it might be your system's problem.

 

[karthik24s]

Try what happens in other system/laptop. If it works there, take a back-up quick. Then full format (zero fill) the drive.
If not, it might be your system's problem.

I already attempted in my friend laptop and home PC too. Observed same behavior (not able to do anything as in file open leading to freeze).

 

[Agera One]

Contact Western Digital center. only they could help you now..

 

[Agera One]

I will send you the profile of a WD representative in tom's hardware through private message to you, tell him about this problem or send this thread link to him.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there karthik24s,

Too many bad sectors could be the reason for the issues you are facing. The bad thing is that the HDD is unresponsive to most the the software/utilities(even the chkdsk) and you may need to back up as much as you can of your data with copy-pasting.

I would not advise you to connect the HDD to other devices or run any other recovery software until you decide that no more data could be recovered through copy-paste.

Another thing you can try is to download Acronis True Image WD edition and try to image the drive on your computer. Then you can try recovering the data from the image. If there is some physical damage on the drive(physical bad sectors as well) this method may help.

WD Acronis: http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD

 

[karthik24s]

Hi there karthik24s,

Too many bad sectors could be the reason for the issues you are facing. The bad thing is that the HDD is unresponsive to most the the software/utilities(even the chkdsk) and you may need to back up as much as you can of your data with copy-pasting.

I would not advise you to connect the HDD to other devices or run any other recovery software until you decide that no more data could be recovered through copy-paste.

Another thing you can try is to download Acronis True Image WD edition and try to image the drive on your computer. Then you can try recovering the data from the image. If there is some physical damage on the drive(physical bad sectors as well) this method may help.

WD Acronis: http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD

Thanks for the response.

I am in process of cloning the WD and will let you know the outcome later today or tommrrow.

Between, any idea why the drive is working "perfectly" on my TV (samsung LCD make) ?

 

[D_Know_WD]

This software can both cloning option and an imaging one. I would advice you to try both and work with the clone and the image(do not write on the original HDD).
If the cloning option encounters an error, it will ask you whether you want to ignore the bad sector. I would advice you to try with ignoring them. This way you can lose the data on this sector(the cloned one), though the drive may stop disconnecting.
If the cloning does not help, it will not hurt to try to image it.

Here is a manual of Acronis: http://support.wdc.com/download/notes/atiwduserguide/ATIH2013WD_userguide_en-US.pdf
You can check 3.7.12 Error handling.

Most probably not all the files will be working good on the TV. You may have played some without bad sectors.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[karthik24s]

Okay, after so many attempts and other all experiments. Finally, I installed UBUntu latest version (dual boot) on my home PC and could see everything (all data) flawless without any disturbance. Though, I didn't spent time on investigating why it didn't work on Fedora or other distro's (was about to attempt RHEL) but in general Linux rocks

I recovered all the data and claimed RMA.

Thanks a bunch for all who replied and helped here in this thread.

 

[D_Know_WD]

I am glad you were able to sort the issue out and recover the data.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[fzabkar]

Another Linux tool is ddrescue. It understands how to clone those drives that have media problems. Ddrescue maintains a log so that it can resume after an interruption.