Question One of my drives crashed. Can I recover any data? How to go about it?

[Ralston18]

@Beachhead1985

Regarding Reliability History/Monitor and Event Viewer: both tools are included with Windows.

Simply click the Windows icon and start typing the tool name.

Many third party tools use the same data that Windows will present.

Just dressed up a bit....

FYI:

How To - How to use Windows 10 Event Viewer | Tom's Hardware Forum (tomshardware.com)

 

[Beachhead1985]

How long has this partition recovery been running?

I suspect that drive is too far gone to "recover".

Over a day, how long should it take?

 

[USAFRet]

Over a day, how long should it take?

Not that long.

And given the above report from HD Tune....it is not looking good.

 

[Beachhead1985]

@Beachhead1985

Regarding Reliability History/Monitor and Event Viewer: both tools are included with Windows.

Simply click the Windows icon and start typing the tool name.

Many third party tools use the same data that Windows will present.

Just dressed up a bit....

FYI:

How To - How to use Windows 10 Event Viewer | Tom's Hardware Forum (tomshardware.com)

I've got it. It's a dog's breakfast. What am I looking for? There is a lot of different categories here in event viewer.

25Nov24 7:12PM SMART fault?

I noted the thing was acting weird and I was in the process of backing it up when it became *VERY* slow. So I gave it a restart, because my PC drops to dead slow when it wants to do an update it needs to restart for and I'm currently using it. Big mistake. Honestly, if I'd realized how critical the situation was then, I could easily have transferred the important files in a few minutes at 355kb/s which was what it was giving me. As it was, I was going through my folders alphabetically.

I copied my work folder first (name starts with A) and then the next folder was super-slow and here we are.

 

[Beachhead1985]

Not that long.

And given the above report from HD Tune....it is not looking good.

Okay, so I should give it up as a bad show?

Cancel partition wizard 12.whatever, try 9.0 on data recovery? Pay for PW12 pro and try that?

If this was running at a decent clip right now, I'd be happy. But my PC just won't run continuously for 100+ days (0% after 1+ days), even if that was worth my time. Sometime, while I'm sleeping it will restart for an update and I'll be back to square one.

 

[USAFRet]

Okay, so I should give it up as a bad show?

Cancel partition wizard 12.whatever, try 9.0 on data recovery? Pay for PW12 pro and try that?

If this was running at a decent clip right now, I'd be happy. But my PC just won't run continuously for 100+ days (0% after 1+ days), even if that was worth my time. Sometime, while I'm sleeping it will restart for an update and I'll be back to square one.

The drive is physically failing.

I doubt any consumer level fix, free or paid, will work.

 

[Ralston18]

Re: "25Nov24 7:12PM SMART fault?"

That is the point - you have to look.

What did you find in Event Viewer and where did you find it?

Path? Perhaps:

Event Viewer
>Applications and Services
>Microsoft
>Windows
>Disks

There are four disk "views" listed.

All those errors are probably the disk's dying gasps....

RIP.

 

[SkyNetRising]

https://imgur.com/Hyavgna

View: https://imgur.com/Hyavgna---Still
running the current version, just found a copy of 9.0 Should I stop this and restart the process with 9.0?

Did you choose quick scan or full scan?
Quick scan would be faster.

Scan process has located two partitions already - spanning entire disk.
GUID Partition Table information is located in first 34 LBA (LBA 0 - 33) and last 34 LBA on the drive.
It's enough to just read that area.

Press Cancel (near Scan progress),
then select all partitions to restore (two checkboxes) and
click finish.

If version 12 is not letting to restore lost partitions, then do the same thing with version 9.

That should allow assigning drive letter to lost partition and accessing data on it.
Access will still be slow because of damaged disk state.

 

[Beachhead1985]

Did you choose quick scan or full scan?
Quick scan would be faster.

Scan process has located two partitions already - spanning entire disk.
GUID Partition Table information is located in first 34 LBA (LBA 0 - 33) and last 34 LBA on the drive.
It's enough to just read that area.

Press Cancel (near Scan progress),
then select all partitions to restore (two checkboxes) and
click finish.

If version 12 is not letting to restore lost partitions, then do the same thing with version 9.

That should allow assigning drive letter to lost partition and accessing data on it.
Access will still be slow because of damaged disk state.

Okay, trying that with 9.0

This does seem faster already.

 

[Beachhead1985]

I swear I'm not doing this because I'm lonely. I also not as big a moron as this makes me sound.

So, yeah; 9.0 on quick scan works great. Was working great.

SO GREAT that I decided to try windows file recovery to get my excel sheets back.

Turns out those two programs do not like each other and everything but task manager froze up and task manager couldn't get anything to even close. So, I restarted it.

I let it roll on restart all night hoping it would sort itself out. No dice. shut it down around 7 this morning, trying to start it now and back to square one. I got to it showing me "preparing automatic repair" and now it's been black screen with cursor for a few hours.

I hoped this wouldn't happen after the autorepair cycle before, but it's also why I wanted to pull the drive to an external shell, because I figured it probably do this on every restart as long as it's in there.

Any ideas on bypassing it somehow?

Oh, and no; Windows File Recovery didn't get me anything.

Thanks for your time.

 

[fzabkar]

@Beachhead1985, your only realistic DIY data recovery path is to clone the drive with a tool that understands how to work with bad heads/media. Unfortunately, you have made the problem much worse by thrashing the drive with all manner of inappropriate tools. Data recovery professionals recommend HDDSuperClone or its fork, OpenSuperClone, or ddrescue. These are all open source.

https://www.reddit.com/r/datarecoverysoftware/wiki/hddsuperclone_guide/

HDDSuperClone/OpenSuperClone incorporate a firmware hack which deals with the "WD slow responding problem".