Technical > Computer Hardware Help > [hard drive] How to read a damaged HDD?

[hard drive] How to read a damaged HDD?

Also, my motherboard is an EVGA x58 SLI 132-BL-E758-TR. Would this allow me to plug the drive into power and SATA or would that further damage it and possibly cause harm to the rest of the computer?
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

reply to Krisnatharok
Based on the following facts/criteria, I would say the likely explanations are:

a) The HPA region of the drive is screwed up in some way (possibly developed a bad sector) -- if this is the case, you're basically SOL. Call a data recovery company ASAP.

b) LBAs 0 through 7, which includes the MBR (if used) and most/part of the GPT table (if used), may have developed bad sectors. Partially SOL here aside, other than a data recovery company or a very skilled engineer who can make some assumptions about the partition table and use some very specific tools.

c) Disk firmware-level catastrophe that has developed; similar to the recent Seagate incidents, where the drive just goes catatonic because internally its stuck in a busy/unusable state. SOL here aside from a data recovery company.

d) Disk may not be powering up all the way. SATA PHY may be initialised and available / accept commands, but the underlying I/O controller isn't responsive.

e) A sub-set of (d) could be the drive is not powering up completely. You can determine this by simply pressing your ear against the drive after powering it up (plugging SATA power cable) and listening for standard spin-up.

I can say without a doubt PUIS is not the reason for this problem, because Windows Vista/7 takes drives out of standby even if the BIOS doesn't.

The evidence/facts presented that I'm basing this conclusion on:

1. Windows Vista/7's green "progress bar" indicates that it's trying to read either the partition table or possibly underlying NTFS data (possibly MFT?) -- LBA 0 through 7 would include the partition table

2. There is no disk-amount-used and total-partition-size indicator for "G:" -- this is probably due to #1 above.

3. You describe how your own system won't even boot even if the wonky disk is placed last in the BIOS boot order. The BIOS still has to scan all connected devices and issue certain ATA commands to get information that comes from the HPA -- such as disk capacity (not the same as partitions), vendor string, etc..

Recommended courses of action:

* You might try running HD Tune Pro even given the above situation. If HD Tune Pro sees the drive and has information available for it under the Info tab, then the HPA region is most likely fine (yay). If that works, I would recommend providing me a screenshot of the Info tab, as well as the Health tab (resize the window so I can see all the attributes please). I might be able to advise from there. This would rule out all possibilities but (b).

* If HD Tune Pro does not see the drive, or does see it but returns an error or simply shows nothing under the Info tab, then problems (a) through (e) are most likely.

In the latter case, you should do absolutely nothing else with the disk, no matter what anyone here on this forum or anywhere else tells you, and contact a data recovery company. I cannot stress the "do not screw with it any more" advice I'm giving in this scenario. Do not let people here try to tell you that using something like Spinrite will fix it, try this random DOS utility, blah blah blah -- do not mess with the drive, anything you do will certainly make the problem worse for data recovery companies.

You might also ask your friend how much he's willing to pay to get his data back. The data recovery company should give you a rough quote up front (prices greatly vary so feel free to shop around).

Also, if anyone recommends to you "you could try replacing the drive PCB", note that this could (MIGHT) address the problem if its (c), (d), or (e). The other problem with replacing drive PCBs is that you have to find an exact replica drive -- same firmware version, same manufacturing plant, and as close to the manufacturing time (of the bad drive) as possible. No online vendor, or anyone selling crap on eBay, discloses this stuff. It's all on the label/sticker on the drive of course, but people are lazy idiots, especially eBay sellers (I caught one who was selling many different drives but kept copy-pasting the same template across all the drives despite the photos being of different drives. I have no idea how long this went on for, but I mailed the guy and asked WTF, and silently he began fixing everything... amazing. I feel bad for whoever bought something from that dude)

And finally, use this opportunity, of course, to hit your friend repeatedly with large sticks while forcing him to write "I will do regular backups" a thousand times on a chalkboard.

If you're not sure what backup software to go with, I currently recommend Active@ Disk Image as it handles both bare metal and incrementals, is inexpensive, and very minimal (no crap services installed, isn't hundreds of megs, provides you with a WinPE boot disk you can use to get into a real Windows environment to work on things for recovery (vs. Acronis which uses Linux and thus NTFS support is "ehhh"), etc.).

P.S. -- I have a drive that is in the exact same condition as what you describe here, and it's a disk from my mother's previous desktop (and is Seagate brand). Drive spins up but is flat out catatonic past that point; even SATA PHY negotiation doesn't occur, and I've done all I can (including using the low-level serial interface on the drive (it's not stuck in BSY, it is just downright screwed beyond belief)), as well as swapping the PCB out with a replacement.

Thankfully my mother, bless her heart, did bi-weekly backups. And I didn't even have to teach her that.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer.

Thanks for all that, I appreciate it. I think the data on the drive (family pictures from the last two years) doesn't rise to the level of professional recovery, but his wife will kill him for throwing the laptop down (apparently the AMD Fusion CPU is slow, and he was frustrated with it, lol).

Do you know if x58 supports hot-swapping SATA drives, or do I stand to damage my motherboard that way? If it does support it, I'd like to try plugging it directly into an SATA port after boot.
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

Trying a different drive caddy (USB2, manufacturer unk, possibly OWC) and it gives off a click of death about twice a second. Going back to the USB3 caddy and it spins up and purrs along. Sometimes the system detects it as a removable reader, most times nothing happens.

Since I am in AHCI mode (running an SSD), I'll give the manual hot-swapping a shot, since I have a HAF 922 case with no hot-swap bay. Stand by...
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

reply to koitsu

Disk Management also stalls on "Connecting to Virtual Disk Service." I guess whatever basic information it can't get off the HDD is holding up the entire system.
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

HD Tune Pro is probably running (you'd need to check Task Manager) but trying to enumerate the devices and ends up getting stuck for the same reason things like "save as" do, etc.. It may eventually time out / give up, or you may have multiple HDTunePro.exe processes running simultaneously as a result.

The clicking you hear when using the USB2 "caddy" may be caused by the drive not getting enough power (e..g it cannot spin up fully). That would be my guess anyway.

This screenshot indicates some portion of the HPA region of the drive is readable (at least intermittently), and that's at least a good sign.

However, if you look closely, Device Manager has "(Not Responding)" in its title. That's further indication it's not truly working. :-)

The problem here is not filesystem-level, so things like CHKDSK etc. are not going to solve anything. Whatever is going on is either HPA-level, sector-level (within the LBA region), or hardware-level.

I'm guessing that possibly some of the HPA is accessible -- things like drive identification string, model, etc. are readable, but other things like drive capacity/size, etc. may be stored in a sector of the HPA that has gone bad.

This is where Windows is probably screwing you hard -- this is why overall I do not believe in trying to diagnose disks with Windows. There is so much abstraction and crap that gets in the way, all this "behind the scenes" nonsense. Using an alternate OS (like a Knoppix LiveCD or something) might actually allow you to get SMART statistics (plus other useful things like SMART error log, etc.) out of the drive.

You could try smartmontools for Windows if you'd like, as long as the drive is hooked up via native SATA and not USB (because smartmontools does not work with all USB enclosures), using smartctl -a /dev/sdX where X is either "a", "b", etc. (first drive, 2nd drive, etc.). You might have to experiment. I would expect, however, that smartmontools will behave the same as everything else -- either lock up, or possibly time out after a short while.

Saving output from a Command Prompt in Windows is like pulling teeth as well, so I tend to recommend -- if you can get output from smartmontools for that drive at all -- that you output everything to a file, e.g. smartctl -a /dev/sdc > C:\drive.txt and then open that in Notepad and copy-paste it here on DSLR/BBR in a [code] block (otherwise formatting is lost -- though it seems DSLR/BBR eats literal tabs, which smartmontools does use). You should end up with something like this:

smartctl 5.42 2011-10-20 r3458 [i686-w64-mingw32-xp-sp3] (sf-win32-5.42-1)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
 
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Caviar Black
Device Model:     WDC WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0
Serial Number:    WD-WCATR7019521
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2b071e92c
Firmware Version: 05.01D05
User Capacity:    1,000,204,886,016 bytes [1.00 TB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   8
ATA Standard is:  Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is:    Mon Jul 23 20:47:37 2012 PST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
 
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
 
General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status:  (0x82)Offline data collection activity
was completed without error.
Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled.
Self-test execution status:      (   0)The previous self-test routine completed
without error or no self-test has ever 
been run.
Total time to complete Offline 
data collection: (18180) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities:  (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
Suspend Offline collection upon new
command.
Offline surface scan supported.
Self-test supported.
Conveyance Self-test supported.
Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities:            (0x0003)Saves SMART data before entering
power-saving mode.
Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability:        (0x01)Error logging supported.
General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine 
recommended polling time:  (   2) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time:  ( 210) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time:  (   5) minutes.
SCT capabilities:        (0x3037)SCT Status supported.
SCT Feature Control supported.
SCT Data Table supported.
 
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   179   178   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       4050
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       88
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   088   088   000    Old_age   Always       -       8849
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   253   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       86
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       52
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       35
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   110   102   000    Old_age   Always       -       37
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
 
SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged
 
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
No self-tests have been logged.  [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t]
 
SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
 SPAN  MIN_LBA  MAX_LBA  CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
    1        0        0  Not_testing
    2        0        0  Not_testing
    3        0        0  Not_testing
    4        0        0  Not_testing
    5        0        0  Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
  After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.
 

I'll give it a shot tomorrow night. I burned my friend's 12 GB of photos onto a couple DVDs and I'll give them to him with which to placate the wife. I don't see myself getting much if any further data off it, but seeing how i know you love troubleshooting bad HDDs, I'll see what I can do.
--
If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.