Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
August 4th, 2017, 21:19
Hi,
I'm new to the forum, but I did google my heart on this one - and checked the many posts in this forum about this drive. I noticed a number of posts that seem to show the same symptoms my drive has, shows in bios, *sometimes* in windows, can be seen by parted magic apps, but one partition will not mount.
Smart tests pass, but has very high reallocated sector count. Its ~ 3 years old, and I suspected it was starting to fail a few weeks ago, so took it out and put it aside. It started failing after several BSODs (which maybe unrelated to the drive, had a graphics card die on me too!) forcing a hard shutdown. About 12 hard shutdowns in total (power of whilst the disk is being accessed).
The data on it isn't that important, otherwise I would have taken it to a professional, but its not junk either and would like to see if I can get some or all of the data off it. So like so many before, I'd like to try it myself, plus its a learning exercise.
The good news is, using ddrescue I can start to clone it to another disk, a st2000dm006, but it is slow, with a maximum transfer speed of about 2MB/s with both the source and destination drives connected via sata III. As I need to use my PC during the day if I was to just let it run I would have to do it for 8 hours a night (restarting it using the log file each time) and would take over a month. I did leave it for several hours and got to 25gig, with only 270kbyte of errors so ddrescue can do its thing, its just too slow. As so many point out that its best to get a clone first.. I'm sure having it running for a month will kill the drive long before its done.
Lots of folks on the web also say its a slow process, because its a failing hard drive, but is there any way to speed it up?
The reason I'm posting here is, if I boot up parted magic, with the failing drive plugged in via sata, and just leave it, the drive will regularly spin up, I hear the arms moving, then it spins down - every few seconds or so, as if something is constantly accessing it, and I believe this is really slowing down the ddrescue clone transfer. This is with the drive unmounted.
I have a USB-ttl 1.8V adapter I use for work, so I hooked it up according to a pinout for seagate drives on the web, 38400bps, 8,N,1, but saw nothing on the terminal when powering up the drive. I was hoping to see at least something. So, question:
Is there anything I can do via terminal to stop the drive being so 'busy' all the time? and hopefully speeding up the cloning process? I have read posts about 'auto reallocation' and 'media cache' problems. But of course I'm not qualified to diagnose the problem, or narrow it down to sectors, heads or firmware.
Any advice?
August 10th, 2017, 19:01
Bump.. does anyone know if the terminal is locked completely on this model? I was under the impression that the terminal would output something - even if it ignored any inputs.
August 11th, 2017, 0:00
Buriedcode2 wrote:Any advice?
Take it to some qualified company. Grenada is not a drive to play with. Heads can scratch surface very quickly.
August 11th, 2017, 13:31
Hi there,
As I mentioned the data I don't think is worth the >£250 for getting it professionally recovered, but rather than just ditch the drive, I thought I would have a go myself.
Seems I can get terminal access (cheap dupont wires meant there was no Tx connection), and I get the (what seems like) standard output:
- Code:
Boot 0x40M
Spin Up
Trans.
Spin Up
SpinOK
TCC:0019
(P) SATA Reset
ASCII Diag mode
F3 T>
So thats something. I realise one can easily brick the drive by just trying random commands found on the web (this isn't a 7200.11 drive, and I don't think its the BSY problem). So, what would be diagnostic commands for this drive? As in, passive commands that provide more information as to whats going on in this drive?
cheers again!
August 12th, 2017, 4:08
Terminal is not locked on this model.
You will probably need to disable the background activity in sys file 93, that's probably what make the drive slow in imaging.
August 12th, 2017, 4:19
ZOC Scripts - Seagate F3 Arch - Set Mode Page Parameters :
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=113&t=1867
August 12th, 2017, 10:46
mr_spokk wrote:Terminal is not locked on this model.
You will probably need to disable the background activity in sys file 93, that's probably what make the drive slow in imaging.
Ah! that was what I was thinking (well, hoping). I don't expect the drive to be blazingly fast when cloning but 0.2-2MB/s was annoying. I shall do more research on how to disable parameters, specifically files 93. I'm used to changing config bit-fields using hex editors for work, but never on a hard drive. I'll post back any results. Thanks!
fzabkar - I'll take a look at those scripts. Looks like a much more "user-friendly" command line interface than manually changing parameters. I might ask some friends if they have a similar dead drive to practice on first. Cheers!
August 19th, 2017, 13:34
I have downloaded ZOC terminal, and that script, and I can see what it does (and how it does it).
But, I am unsure what to disable and what to leave as is? I am assuming DAR (Deferred Auto-Reallocation) should be disabled, along with idle activity.
Should I just disable all of these? I am just trying to speed up cloning so I can get rid of the drive.
Sorry for all the questions.