Old Maxtor recovery - I/O error

[maximus]

Assuming you continue with the imaging process, you can provide a log after awhile and I will be happy to give an update based on it.

[oneRd]

Thank you so much!!

Happy to hear the situation does not seem that dire. Hopefully I will be able to access it again..

I will then try to clone some more. The drive is partially full, say half. Also fragmentation should be reasonably low as I did it not so long previous the failure with little changes (using mostly to browse internet and working on a few docs and pics). Hopefully important data will be recovered all first and then the rest will be empty space.

[RolandJS]

Question: Is it best to run cloning software set for one pass/one read each sector rather than multi-read attempts on any problematic sector?

[fzabkar]

I would do 1 read per pass.

[maximus]

Question: Is it best to run cloning software set for one pass/one read each sector rather than multi-read attempts on any problematic sector?

Always best to never retry any sector/cluster until after all other sectors/clusters have been attempted. Get the readable data first, then go back for the trouble spots. HDDSuperClone does this by default. The drive could die at any time, so spending time rereading sectors before all is attempted is a good way to not recover data.

[pepe]

Specialist equipment would help a lot in both diag and recovery, it might also save your data from getting completely ruined by drive and OS retries and wrong algorythms.
Specialist equipment with specialist knowledge i mean...

I would not give any other advice, coz experimenting leads to loss of all chances.
And i consider it a waste of time

[oneRd]

Assuming you continue with the imaging process, you can provide a log after awhile and I will be happy to give an update based on it.

I resumed the cloning a couple of times for a total of around 10 h. The recovery seems to be proceeding at a stable pace and it should have gone past most of the meaningful data.

Log should be attached..

okk.rar

(4.54 KiB) Downloaded 481 times

[maximus]

Very good results so far. There is a slight pattern to indicate a weak head, but still reading almost all data, it just skips on some slow reads. As long as that head doesn't die and there isn't a bad spot yet to come up, I predict a very good recovery, 99.9999%

[oneRd]

99.999306%

I stopped it after making sure the remaining non-scraped sectors would be taking ages to be processed.

I hope those few MBs left do not affect the few files I want to recover.

I plan to mount the image on Linux or Windows, performing a fsck first? Do you think there are chances I can access the data this way? Can I still resume the recovery after fsck or the image will be out of sync with the log file?

okk.rar

(9.59 KiB) Downloaded 474 times

[fzabkar]

I wouldn't use fsck or chkdsk to make any repairs. Instead I would recover your data to a third drive. (You may need to recover more non-scraped sectors, in which case any repairs made by fsck may cause problems.)

As for mounting the image, NTFS volumes have a backup copy of the boot sector at the very end. I don't know how the OS would deal with a missing backup.

Also, if your drive is partitioned as GPT rather than MBR, then there will be a backup copy of the GPT metadata at the end of the drive.

Congratulations, BTW.

[oneRd]

Thank you!! I feel so much lighter now.

...to a third drive.

Well I could put the image in the spare 7200.10 test I have. What are the advantages of recovering data to a drive vs accessing the image directly (if possible)? I just have to recover a few docs and photos. I would prefer avoiding to tie up my PC for one more full day of recovery.

I don't know how the OS would deal with a missing backup.

I think I will make a copy of the image and try to mount it in different ways. Any suggestion for that?

Last edited by oneRd on September 21st, 2019, 18:28, edited 1 time in total.

[fzabkar]

I would boot from a Linux Live CD and see if it will mount your FS. I would avoid Windows since it may launch CHKDSK automatically in repair mode.

[oneRd]

I have successfully gained access to my data and recovered everything

I had some small setbacks at mounting the image but I solved it specifying the partition offset.
In fact those few damaged blocks I gave up recovering I believe are not involved with any of my data but are all system based.

Code:

lubuntu@lubuntu:~$ sudo mount -o loop,offset=1048576 /media/lubuntu/Storage/HddSuper/prova/image /media/lubuntu/Storage/HddSuper/prova/mountpoint
Windows is hibernated, refused to mount.
Did not find any restart pages in $LogFile and it was not empty.
The file system wasn't safely closed on Windows. Fixing.
Falling back to read-only mount because the NTFS partition is in an
unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation
or fast restarting.)
Could not mount read-write, trying read-only


Read-only was more that enough

It was April 21; a five month adventure where I learned many things and yet merely scratched the surface of DR. It was enough to have an idea of how complex is a HDD, how much time and effort you need to make a recovery and to build the necessary experience to be a DR person. I completely understand now why their services are so (relatively) expensive. This is what I got for not having backuped my data regularly, and I've been very lucky my HDD was in a still good enough state I could access it with a few commands. It was a good lesson.

A special thank goes to maximus and especially fzabkar who assisted me from the beginning until the end and everyone who took part in this discussion. Thank you guys!

Another thing I learned: stay away form Seagate. And speaking of which, what HDD brand would you guys advice these days?

I think I will try to run a CHKDSK with Windows and see if it is able to make the image bootable again, although I do not hold out much hope for it, and I will likely try to regenerate the HDD and use it for unimportant stuff; so I might post again for advice.

[fzabkar]

Backblaze provides its hard drive reliability statistics on a quarterly basis:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/

HGST has been the most reliable, but Toshiba appears to be challenging for the top spot.

[silvanet]

All 3 appear to be 3.3V TTL-serial converters. Take your pick, but make sure you get an additional cable for the first two.

Just a question. I bought some adapters and connectors to try but all the connectors were far too large to connect to the serial pins in Seagate and a Maxtor drives. I was able to do a loopback test on the USB-TTL devices on PuTTY and RealTerm, but likely to bend or destroy the pins on the drives. Trying to find wires with small enough connectors on the drive end to work. Can you suggest a solution?

[silvanet]

Well, I learned an important lesson:
Don't buy Seagate hard drives.
Is there a good preferred brand among you guys?

[maximus]

All 3 appear to be 3.3V TTL-serial converters. Take your pick, but make sure you get an additional cable for the first two.

Just a question. I bought some adapters and connectors to try but all the connectors were far too large to connect to the serial pins in Seagate and a Maxtor drives. I was able to do a loopback test on the USB-TTL devices on PuTTY and RealTerm, but likely to bend or destroy the pins on the drives. Trying to find wires with small enough connectors on the drive end to work. Can you suggest a solution?

Remove the connectors from the square plastic, um, insulators (not sure what to call them). They should only be locked on with a tab you can push or pry. You will be left with just the metal and it should fit then, but it helps to put some thin tape on them to prevent shorting.

[silvanet]

Thanks, that worked!

[oneRd]

Remove the connectors from the square plastic, um, insulators (not sure what to call them). They should only be locked on with a tab you can push or pry. You will be left with just the metal and it should fit then, but it helps to put some thin tape on them to prevent shorting.

..and wrap every single pin with tape. Oops.. said already