Recover of USB drive with lost partition info

[alessiob]

Hello all, and thanks for letting me in the forum.

I have a Lacie 1TB Usb drive that unfortunately fell to ground from 50 cm while was writing data.

The hard disk shows now as (Unallocated) in Partition Manager 10.

Reattaching and repowering the drive i could not hear strange sounds related to a possible crash.

I am running recovery with deep analysis with Arax (also showed Unallocated) and after 5 days it had scanned only 4.7GB of 931GB; even if the status bar says 103hr left it is at 1% so I think it will continue for months.

Arax also says it had found 0 partitions.

As I know exactly how the drive was partitioned and formatted (I have another drive of the same kind, only one partition, NTFS formatted) , my question is:

Can I partition the (Unallocated) drive to speedup the recovery process (Partition and start recovery again) or this move will make me lose more data?

Any suggestion about other moves?

Thanks and best regards to all

Alessio

[Cleanroom]

Most likely when it fell it damaged one of the reading heads.

I would recommend to stop using it and see if you can find a DR pro in your area to do a free eval on it.

[hddmania]

Try contacting user BlackSt in this forum. He should be near you!

Stop the logical recovery software before you cause more damages. More than likely you have the internal physical damage such as at least 1 damaged head.

[alessiob]

Thanks for your replies. The data in the drive is not so important to justify a professional recovery. If I cannot recover the drive I will trash it.
I would like to know about my question, assuming there is no physical damage. If there is physical damage I wil trash the drive.

Thanks

Alessio

[Alexii]

I would not assume that physical damage is not present. On the contrary it seems u have it. If the head(s) is damaged - nothing will help u speed the recovery process up. Only specialised cloning softaware with ability to disable heads will ( u can determine and disable the failed heads , and just get the data under the working ones )

Now if u really want to keep on playing with the drive - u can take it from the enclosure, plug it directly to mother board , boot from MHDD disk and do a surface test. Skip the begining of ur drive to like 10 mil sector for example. If the surface will go all good good good and then a sudden drop , then good good good again and drop again, all following the same pattern - then u deffinatly have a failed head. And like i said - u need specialised soft. If by some miracle ur surface test is all good - then that just meens that the begining of ur drive is fubared and the heads are ok. In that event u can direct the recovery soft to start from a location that is beyond the damaged patch and get ur info this way. Ull get it RAW since wont have MFT to help u.
Or clone the puppy and run recovery soft on the clone. ( ull have to make sure ur cloner skips bad and slow sectors or it will take forever as well )

[alessiob]

Thanks Alexii,

I am ready to go on with your suggestions. I have a couple of questions:

what software you would suggest as "specialised cloning software with ability to disable heads"

and which cloner software to make the image if it is not the same one.

If an head is damaged, will data be recoverable anyway? I mean, what is the write strategy? i.e. 8 heads - 8 bytes, one to each plate (this would mean that with one crashed head the drive is unrecoverable) or one block (one sector) for every head?

Thanks and have a good we

Alessio

[BlackST]

Thanks Alexii,

I am ready to go on with your suggestions. I have a couple of questions:

what software you would suggest as "specialised cloning software with ability to disable heads"

and which cloner software to make the image if it is not the same one.

If an head is damaged, will data be recoverable anyway? I mean, what is the write strategy? i.e. 8 heads - 8 bytes, one to each plate (this would mean that with one crashed head the drive is unrecoverable) or one block (one sector) for every head?

Thanks and have a good we

Alessio

Per Alessio

1) Non si tratta di software ma di sistemi HW+SW , se hai voglia di spendere migliaia di Euro, accomodati...
2) Se una delle testine e' danneggiata, ovviamente tutto quello che era di sua pertinenza non verra' letto - vedi punto 3
3) I dati sono organizzati in maniera molto diversa da come pensi

A farla breve, se il danno c'e' , non c'e' nessuna soluzione alla tua portata. E piu' il drive e' acceso, peggio e'.

For everyone else :

1) It's not SW but HW+SW systems, if you want to spend thousands Euro, you're welcome
2) If one head is gone, obviously what belongs to it won't be accessible - see pt. 3)
3) Data is organized in a very different way.

To cut a long story short, there's no DIY solution for you, and the more the drive is on, the more the damage.

[alessiob]

Thanks for your message.

I will try some more with software, than I will try repartitioning, than if still fails, I will trash the drive and replace it.

I had only movies in the disk, with some par files.

Best regards

Alessio

[BlackST]

Se vuoi evitarti la fatica (perche' stai perdendo tempo), sostituiscilo direttamente. In ogni caso se anche per ipotesi dovesse rimettersi a funzionare sara' solo apparente, e' una bomba a orologeria.

More easily, as you are wasting time, replace it straight away. However, even if it will be "start working" again by a chance, it will be apparently fixed. It's a time bomb, instead.