Question Seagate 3TB HDD spinning up but not recognized by computer

[MarshallLucky]

I have a 3TB Seagate internal drive that was theoretically mirrored to an identical drive. The mirror apparently broke somehow and neither drive appears in Windows explorer. The previously appeared as the "V" drive, ie, behaving as a mirror should as one drive. Now there is no mirror and neither appear in windows but do appear separately in diskmgmt utility. One shows as "Unallocated" and "Not initialized" and is listed as 128GB. The other drive, other half of former mirror, appeared as "Foreign", when i reintroduced the drive, don't recall what diskmgmt called this process, for a moment the V drive did appear again, but when clicked it it basically froze. Rebooting resulted in "problem with V drive" and was doing diskcheck, which i calculated would complete in 32 years. When removed and in an external enclosure, i can feel it spinning, it does not make any appreciable noise except normal spinning. I opened it up briefly to look a the physical disk, it looks fine, now grooves, head/arm parked to the side as expected, etc. PCB has no visible burn marks, although power connections are little tarnished (not severely). Physically all looks good, spins fine, but does not appear in Windows Explorer.

Anybody have suggestions?

 

[DSzymborski]

What do you mean by "theoretically mirrored?"

In any case, the drive you opened, if it wasn't dead before, it may very well be now. You *never* open up a hard drive unless you're in a clean room. And I mean a technical clean room, like this:

 

[MarshallLucky]

What do you mean by "theoretically mirrored?"

In any case, the drive you opened, if it wasn't dead before, it may very well be now. You *never* open up a hard drive unless you're in a clean room. And I mean a technical clean room, like this:

When i built this computer back in 2015, as i recall, i used the Windows disk mirroring capability. All worked fine until a month or so ago, when i noticed the V drive (used it for storage only, operating system was and is on separate drive).

 

[MarshallLucky]

When i built this computer back in 2015, as i recall, i used the Windows disk mirroring capability. All worked fine until a month or so ago, when i noticed the V drive (used it for storage only, operating system was and is on separate drive).

Regarding opening the drive, while i dont' claim to be an expert, the issue is dust. That is to say, mechanical damage to a hard drive surface. But there are cases where there is visible damage, way worse than what a dust particle would inflict, and yet data in the undamaged portion of the disk can be recoverable. In any case, i'm not going to spend $1000 for data recovery because i have most of it backed up. But if i can get it back, it would be convenient, so I'm going diy route. But thank you for the heads up, regardless.

 

[DSzymborski]

Eeek, yeah, the Windows pseudo-RAID isn't really a great one to use. It basically has most of the downsides of a RAID without any of the benefits. Since you didn't have a process that lets you know when an automated backup failed (unless I misread), it's a very real possibility that one died a month ago and then the other died now.

Was this important data? If so, did you keep a second backup as is recommended as the minimum for key data? If the answer to the first question is yes and the second is no, then it may be time to consider a lab as there's no real fix at the consumer level once the drive can no longer by read by an operating system. For the drive you didn't open at least. Though I'd also try DMDE.

If the data is not important, just send the drives to recycling. Chasing problems like this on basic consumer HDDs, once they get to this level, will have you pulling out your hair to little benefit.

 

[DSzymborski]

Ah, if you have proper backups and there's nothing life-changing in there, in your case, I'd simply throw in the towel and value your time and money highly! Glad to hear that you did have a second backup. We get a *lot* of people with very poorly configured backup system and sometimes they lose their only copy of things they've had for decades and it's really heart-breaking.

 

[MarshallLucky]

I have most of it, perhaps all, luckily. Part of this is an academic exercise for me, curious to see if i can do it. But so far, yes, it is exercise in hair pulling.

 

[MarshallLucky]

DMDE is able to see some files and i did recover a (single) sample file. However, when it is building the directory structure, it halts progress with "the request failed due to a fatal device hardware error". If i hit ignore it does the same thing but on next LBA (which i interpret to be a 512 byte segment of the drive, since 3TB / 5860533167 = about 512 = 2^9). This behavior is similar to when, on one of my reboots, chkdisk ran and got about 4% of the way through and then ran extremely slow, with projected finish time of 32 years, assuming each sector took same amount of time). Anyway, my question is, should i just let DMDE do the best it can? Some threads recommend cloning and working with the copy, ok, great, but how is it going to be able to clone it if the head isn't operating correctly? Anybody ever switch out the platter to an otherwise good drive?

 

[fzabkar]

Clone the drive with HDDSuperClone (now forked into OpenSuperClone). HDDSuperClone/OpenSuperClone understand how to work with failing HDDs.

 

[fzabkar]

In any case, the drive you opened, if it wasn't dead before, it may very well be now. You *never* open up a hard drive unless you're in a clean room. And I mean a technical clean room, like this:

Although they like to cultivate an image of "engineers" in bunny suits, very few DR workshops (perhaps < 1%) have a genuine cleanroom. Most have a clean cabinet, like this:

https://files.hddguru.com/download/Other stuff/DIY Clean Chamber V2/1. Front View - 1024.JPG

https://files.hddguru.com/download/Other stuff/DIY Clean Chamber V2/
https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=29602

Moreover, they routinely refer to their workplaces as "labs". In reality they are nothing of the sort.

 

[MarshallLucky]

HDDSuperClone/OpenSuperClone

Will that work on a Windows machine?

 

[fzabkar]

Will that work on a Windows machine?

Windows cloning tools are useless for sick drives. That's because Windows interferes with the error recovery process.

HDDSuperClone has a GUI and Live CD that should alleviate much of the pain for Linux novices.

 

[MarshallLucky]

Ok, great, thank you. I actually have Ubuntu installed (8 years ago) but can't remember my password (and Guest login apparently blocks access to the (non-boot) drives in question). But yeah i guess i can try a thumb drive, in the absence of sudden total recall.