[SOLVED] Recover Data from (Logical?) HDD Failure

[JimmyGibbsJr]

A while ago my Seagate Barracuda drive had failed on me, I had ignored the warning signs where my drive had stopped being recognized on startup occasionally, until it fully wouldn't boot.

I recently purchased a USB SATA connector to try to troubleshoot and hopefully recover data from the drive. Upon mounting, the drive bogged down the whole operating system, slowing it down to a crawl, so I disabled automounting through command prompt and restart the drive. It now shows up under disk management with healthy partitions, however I've no idea as where to go from here.

Can anyone offer me any help as to recovery?

 

[USAFRet]

First test...
Power up the PC without that drive connected.
After the system is running, connect it.
Does the system recognize it at all?

 

[USAFRet]

"I had ignored the warning signs where my drive had stopped being recognized on startup occasionally, until it fully wouldn't boot. "

 

[JimmyGibbsJr]

Yeah I know, I had never experienced any hardware issues in my life until that moment and I shrugged it off stupidly. Live and learn I suppose. I'm looking into RAID after that incident since I can't bear data loss like that again.

Does the system recognize it at all?

Yes, the system does recognize the drive and attempts to mount it when it is powered on, but it bogs up the system as I said, and I cannot read any data off it.

 

[USAFRet]

Yeah I know, I had never experienced any hardware issues in my life until that moment and I shrugged it off stupidly. Live and learn I suppose. I'm looking into RAID after that incident since I can't bear data loss like that again.

Yes, the system does recognize the drive and attempts to mount it when it is powered on, but it bogs up the system as I said, and I cannot read any data off it.

RAID, of any type, is NOT a backup or solution to protect your data.
There are much better methods.

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[JimmyGibbsJr]

RAID, of any type, is NOT a backup or solution to protect your data.
There are much better methods.

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

I'll take a look, thanks. Guess I've got misconceptions about it.

 

[USAFRet]

A RAID 1 mirror is probably what you're thinking of.

That only benefits overall Uptime, not safeguarding data.
For instance, allows a system to keep running in the event of a physical drive fail. Does NOT ward off any of the other forms of data loss.

 

[fzabkar]

The drive could be bogged down with error recovery during its POST. If this takes too long, then BIOS gives up waiting for it and times out. Depending on the model, there are DIY methods to stabilise the drive so that it can be cloned.

See https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?t=38411

 

[rforce]

Can you provide the full details about the model of the drive or even a picture of the top cover?

"You can give a try to RecoverIt, Stellar data recovery professional or Recuva."
Don't even both wasting your time downloading the programs. If you are looking for programs that are actually used by real data recovery professionals, you'd want to be looking at R-Studio, UFS Explorer, ReclaiMe and GetDataBack. You should never, ever, ever, ever run a file system recovery program against a failing hard drive. Your first step should always get a full sector-by-sector clone and then run the file system recovery programs against the stable healthy clone drive.

 

[RolandJS]

",,,sector-by-sector clone..." not only that, clone should only do single-sector single-pass, no multi-read attempts.