Seagate HDD - 5652 Reported Uncorrectable Errors...

[MysticDaedra]

When to Cuba for a week (yay!), left my PC off the entire time. Was working fine when I left. Got home, slept like a baby. In the morning, turned on the computer and encountered a strange error, with random freezes. Restarted a couple times, then tried running The Witcher 3. The opening cinematic was strangely jerky, as if it were buffering. This shouldn't be a thing, as my computer is very decent. So on a whim I ran HDD Guardian...

5652 Reported Uncorrectable Errors, 16 Reallocated Sectors. Wow. Don't know what could have caused this, haven't touched the computer in over a week.

I realize that HDD is certainly toast. Warranty is long past expired, so I'm just going to have to get a new drive. I do have an extra hard drive that is large enough, but I'm wondering what the chances of data recovery are for me. I could copy the contents over, but maybe there is a special procedure/method I should follow? The hard drive has almost 2 TB of downloaded files on it, that would literally take at least a year of solid downloading with my internet connection to recover, if I can't back the files up.

I pride myself on being computer savvy, but in this instance I'm not sure if copying will have any lasting side-effects that I should be aware or prepared for. Primarily the busted hard drive is where I've installed all of my Steam games; is there any way to easily copy the contents over to the new drive without Steam freaking out and re-downloading anyways?

TL;DR: What can I do to safely recover my data? How can I keep Steam from re-downloading my games, and have it recognize them automatically in the new drive location?

Thanks for the help.

 

[Mattios]

First thing you need to do is just copy everything over because that drive is certainly on it's last legs. Drag and drop as much as you can, while keeping the folder structure, onto a different drive. Once you've done that we'll deal with fixing steam games.

Bear in mind it may die during the transfer. If you really value that data, go to a data recovery professional, but by the sounds of it you don't mind that much.

 

[R_1]

copying from corrupted media is problematic at best. the data in a bad area may copy the damaged data to the new drive corrupting the data.
I used to use a tool called spinrite from https://www.grc.com/
it's 90 bucks but effective

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, MysticDaedra.

You are in a tough situation. Moving Steam is possible. Here's how to do that: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129.
When your hard drive starts to fail, the most important thing is that you recover the most valuable data you have on it. It's a very good thing that you still have access to your drive. There's no "special" procedure in this case. I mean, after all, even if you use Ubuntu to try and access the files, or data recovery software, everything is targeted at getting access to the drive and recovering the data, so you have that covered at least for now. The bad thing is that in cases like this one, when there's physical damage, it's quite possible that the more you use the HDD, the more likely it is to get worse. That's why I recommend that you go for the most important files first, the ones that can't be replaced (like pictures, videos, documents, projects, etc). Everything else is with a lower priority, no matter how long it takes for you to download it. So have that in mind, while backing up your files.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how everything goes. I hope you're able to relocate all of your data successfully.
Boogieman_WD

 

[MysticDaedra]

So I restarted for checkdisk before I read that in this scenario, running checkdisk might cause more harm than good. Many hours later, HDD Guardian is now reporting a solid 14000 Current Pending Sector and 14000 Offline Uncorrectable. Both have a purple dot next to them. Reported Uncorrect (187) shows 11378 now, but the dot is green for some reason. Am I way off-base to assume that perhaps checkdisk has isolated the damage, and it might be safe to start backing up the data without too much fear of transferring corrupted bytes?

I fortunately keep all my sensitive files (pictures, videos, documents etc.) on a separate internal drive, and neither the problem drive nor the backup drive house the OS, so no worries about that. My Internet connection is terribly slow however, due to location. Re-downloading tons of files will be a major problem for me, quite literally taking more than a year of solid downloading (I know, very VERY slow internet), which isn't even possible because I share my connection with three other people. Gaming is my hobby; needless to say, going for a very long time without my hobby will be rather difficult lol.

I appreciate all the help; this is a marvelous community, and the first place I go for help/advice when I'm having problems with my computer. I will be sure to update as I figure this out as well.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Thanks for the kind words.

Basically what chkdsk does, is to try and reallocate those bad sectors and mark them, so that they are not used anymore. Whether or not it is safer to start transferring your files - it is difficult for me to determine that. New bad sectors could appear (as well as during a chkdsk scan), but you don't have a lot of different options at this point. If a files is corrupted or unreadable, hopefully after the "verifying game cache files" step in the tutorial from my previous post, everything will be OK. I mean if there's something missing, you might end up downloading just a small chunk or a file instead of the whole game, but I think this is done automatically when Steam verifies those files. Although if you want more detailed information on that, you should probably get in touch with their customer support.

 

[TyrOd]

Thanks for the kind words.

Basically what chkdsk does, is to try and reallocate those bad sectors and mark them, so that they are not used anymore. Whether or not it is safer to start transferring your files - it is difficult for me to determine that. New bad sectors could appear (as well as during a chkdsk scan), but you don't have a lot of different options at this point. If a files is corrupted or unreadable, hopefully after the "verifying game cache files" step in the tutorial from my previous post, everything will be OK. I mean if there's something missing, you might end up downloading just a small chunk or a file instead of the whole game, but I think this is done automatically when Steam verifies those files. Although if you want more detailed information on that, you should probably get in touch with their customer support.

The safest DIY solution to reading an unstable drive is to use ddrescue since it can safely skip bad sectors without reallocating or corrupting data further. It won't guarantee that the read/write heads won't fail in the process, but it's as close as you can get to what professional data recovery labs use.