Seagate HDD failure and recovery issues

[Karsten75]

Sometime last Saturday I started noticing some glitches in my PC's performance - some unexplained "hangs" and slow responses as well as slow page loads for the Internet.

I started looking at stuff and eventually focused on drive issues.

CrystalDisk confirmed some SMART failures:

I downloadaed Seagate Seatools and did a SMART check. That reported no issues.

However, the Short Drive test failed.

Note that the 2nd Seagate HDD (appearing at the top of the drive list) is the intended replacement HDD (Yay for Amazon Prime Now and 2-hour delivery on Easter Sunday!)

I must now say that I've had about 3 Seagate HDDs fail on me - two were the SSHD type on another computer, one of those was DOA. So I'm becoming less of a Seagate fan, but I was relying on Seagate tools and utilities to make a smooth and painless transition to a new HDD.

Installed the new HDD (same 2TB capacity as old drive) and had the Seagate Disk Wizard clone the old drive. Note that Windows CHKDSK says there are no issues or corrupted files. All seem good from a software perspective, some some drive operations seem to be taking excessively long. In fact, I'm typing this in the computer with the failing HDD.

The failing drive has my user folders on it, I migrated my user folders off the SSD due to space issues. so it's an integral part of my Windows system (I know know better and most likely won't do that again if you follow along here).

Anyway, after cloning the drive, I disconnected the old drive and swapped cables, etc. so the new drive was in the place of the old drive.

Now my real misfortunes began.

Windows would not boot up and claimed that there was no user profile available. So it would appear the Seagate DIsk Wizard cloning operation was not good ( I had no logs or anything, since the Wizard rebooted after the cloning operation and I had wandered away while the drive cloning was running.

Putting the old drive back in with the original cables and keeping the new drive in a different SATA port also caused Windows boot to fail. I had to physically remove the new (cloned drive) before I could reboot and then all was "normal" if normal includes poor drive response times.

Anyone can throw some light on alternative actions I can take to get the drive cloned and installed?

All I can think of is a completely clean install of Windows 10, with the disruption that entails - look for a new post soon asking about some finer points for doing that.

 

[DR_Luke]

I do a lot of recoveries on this particular model of Seagate. The most common issues we find are as follows:

- damaged media cache (firmware issue) which requires expensive data recovery tools to disable
- weak or dead read/write head (sometimes will read fine for the first few percent of the drive)
- media damage (drive will eventually have a fatal crash and will no longer be recoverable)

So, it is possible that you are not getting a clean copy of the data. If you want a stable system, you should do a fresh OS install and then import the data.

As for cloning the drive, more from the data recovery perspective, I suggest you do a full sector-by-sector copy using the GNU ddrescue, but you will need a destination drive of equal or larger capacity.

 

[Karsten75]

Right now, it appears I can read all the data and everything on the drive is backed up. The major Issue I'm facing is that the drive is part of the OS because of how I set up the user to have the user directory on the drive. So if it fails I can't boot up Windows and I can't allocate a different user on the C:-drive (I was experimenting when I built this system and wanted to do some tweaks to see how it works out long-term. Now I'm wiser. but in a precarious situation.

I did this some number of years back and I've also encountered major issues with installing MS Office on the drive - needed some major tweaks and registry mods, so I won't ever do it this way again.