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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
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Failing Seagate

March 13th, 2013, 2:07

Working on a friends computer. System stopped booting. Bios Recognizes drive, boot will go black and the restart with no boot device available. It will boot to the Windows error recovery. Trying to repair boot up it will just hang. I hooked it up to my Windows 8 box. I saw all of the partitions. I was going to copy off what I could but it started getting slow and then some folders didn't show any data and then the drive disappeared from disk management. On other reboots I can see all the partitions but the now show as raw.
Booted with DOS seatools and got DST failed - electrical element on the short test.
The long test will go to 1.5% and then error as well and complains about bad sectors and that it can't talk to the drive and to check cables. I examined the PCB, don't see anything that looks burnt and there is no burnt smell.
Spins fine, no abnormal noises.
Partition sizes look normal (small OEM, recovery, and main boot) from second computer, except disk manager show the disk as read only and the partitions are RAW.


What to do now?

Attached seatools screen.
Attachments
seatools.jpg
Seatools screen

Re: Failing Seagate

March 13th, 2013, 3:07

I would suggest that you should image this drive as soon as possible and stop trying to recover the files now. Your drive is failing and while possible image this to another drive. Then from the imaged or cloned drive you should be able to recover the files you want. Then replace the drive and load your system again. Check on Linux there is a program you can use to do this imaging to another drive. Once you have a clone of your HDD then you can use any DR program to get back your data. You say the partitions are showing as RAW. This should be NTFS and I would use Get Data Back NTFS. You can try it before buying it.
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