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
February 9th, 2011, 10:53
Hi,
The other day my gf's windows 7 machine tried to do a disk check on a legacy drive that she had in there. It ran through most of the diskcheck and then got to somthing like writing verification journal at the end where it stayed for over an hour. After i rebooted it the same thing happened. On next boot she told it to skip the check. Windows came up ok and the drive (not the primary one) was visable. After a while her PC crashed, on next reboot the legacy drive wasn't showing any more.
I have put it in a caddy and hooked it up to my linux machine. I can see the drive in fdisk -l and it mounts ok. However it only last for a few moments. If I start browsing too many directories or start copying files off of it it crashes.
dmesg reports something like interrupted io channel (im not at home to get the exact message but i will post later)
There is no clicking or grinding noises coming from the drive and i can feel that the platters are spinning constantly.
I'm guessing it is a hardware fault but there is some data i would really like to get off of the drive.
Anyone have any idea what they think the fault would be. Im guessing maybe the motor that moves the heads or the heads themselves are getting gummed up or something.
I've read that a common fault with the Barracuda drives is that they had a coating on them that chip off and gum up the head.
I'm happy to (carefully!!!) pull the drive apart and have a look/replace some bits as the cheapest data recovery price i have got so far is £450+
Thanks for your advice!
Karl
February 9th, 2011, 10:59
Sounds like media issues (Bad sectors).
You could risk it and try imaging to another good drive using a non-windows imaging s/w (e.g. Media Tools Pro) and then running recovery s/w on the image.
Or if the data is valuable then seek pro assistance.
£450 is very steep for this kind of problem (assuming that's what it is, it does sound very much like it), we would charge around half that for this kind of work usually, unless it's DIY'd first!
PM me if interested.
But please take note that if you DO try DIY and the drive completely dies, then expect a bill of 2x or 3x the price.
Cheers
February 9th, 2011, 11:03
Hi
I should add that I was unable to run a ddrescue on it either.
ddrescue initialised but never actually started writing the image
Karl
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