Trying Data-Recovery from Seagate ST4000

[George-S]

Hi all,

I have a Seagate ST-4000 DM000 from ~2015 here. I guess it ran into age-related problems. It started with repetitive short rattling. Next came read errors and malfunctions of software trying to access it. Windows shutdown was delayed while that HD was rattling a lot.

Hoping to identify bad clusters and get the rest of the data into a shape where it could be copied, I tried chkdsk /f and chkdsk /r. From what I read in the meantime, that was a big mistake. Errors were corrected, no clusters were marked bad, but a lot of files disappeared. Plus, the HD took longer to get recognized by Windows and display a directory with every time it was restarted. Still, some directories which were still visible could be copied using Windows Explorer before that one slowed down to zero in attempts to read more data.

So I turned to HDD Raw Copy Tool 1.10 Free, bought a new HD of same model and started to clone the old HD. An identical one was not available, the new one is ST4000 DM004 and is flatter than the DM000, i.e. has fewer platters. I hope that does not matter.

HDD Raw Copy worked at 1,7 MB/sec, which is faster than what I have seen in Hangart’s thread here:
http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=39074&p=278443&hilit=HDD+Raw+Copy#p278443
Also, it did not indicate a single Read-Error, so it does not look that bad.

But today, after 11 days and 37% copied, the PC on which this ran just rebooted. I am not sure why. It was not a power failure and I was in another room in that moment.

I am not sure how to continue now. Unlike Hangart, I am not making an image file. So I would need a tool which can continue the work at an offset. Could you recommend me one, best for Windows? I wrote down twice daily, which sector HDD Raw Copy displayed, so I could start from the last number.

Also, there will be a lot of files to be undeleted. Can you recommend me a tool for that too?

So far, the image is displayed in Windows with the same name and disk-signature as the original, but no directory is displayed when I double-click it in “My Computer”. Is this normal and will it change once all sectors have been copied correctly?

I would appreciate any help.


Thanks
George-S

[pepe]

first unmount all partitions residing on those 2 disks. I don't really know hdd raw copy tool but it should have some way to start at an arbitrary offset.
It would be easy under linux using dd or ddrescue too.
1.7MB/sec is very slow, so the disk must be in severe condition already. (or the cloning sofware is poorly written, test it with 2 good disks)
Note that these solutions are not the best for cloning drives with problems, the drive may or may not survive this torture you give it for several weeks.

pepe

[George-S]

Hi Pepe,
don't worry, both HDs were connected via USB 3.0. They are off for now. The adapers can do UAS (USB attached SCSI), so low-level access is possible.

As for HDD Raw Copy, it seems that it can vary the speed according to the difficulty of reading. In the very beginning, it read at 0.5-1.5 MB/s. Then came a short good area and it picked up speed - up to 50 MB/s. Then the speed went down again and stayed at ~1,8 MB/s. But it progressed steadily and read it all - until the shutdown came. And no, there does not seem to be a way to restart it with an offset.

I took a look at ddrescue in the meantime. It seems to be a Linux command line tool which would require an input file to tell it about the 2.882.679.680 clusters which are already saved. I have limited experience with Linux (Ubuntu-MATE). So I could try to set this up here, but I would need some help with that.

I was shocked when I realized, how long this would take, that this was normal for HDD Raw Copy and that I had now blocked my PC for a month or more. I would have set it up with a USV if I had known. Next time I'll do this and use an old laptop in a remote corner. Then it can take however long it takes.

The approach of ddrescue seems clever: rescue the readable stuff first, before you spend the HD's remaining lifetime trying to read a hard-to-read area. And go from easy to hard-to-read in several passes, until you have it (almost) all. It would be great though, if there were a handier tool for doing it this way. Recommendations, anyone?

[northwind]

Try HDDSuperClone
Look here:
https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php ... 41#p279241

it's still Linux but has many features you'll need.

[George-S]

Thanks Northwind,

I just downloaded the free version. They urge the user to start with the manual, which is "only" 76 pages long. Guess there is no simpler program - or is there?

From a first glance at the manual, it looks like I better use an old Ubuntu 14.04, because Ubuntu has "removed something nobody needs" in later versions:

SPECIAL NOTE FOR ATA-PASSTHROUGH ON LINUX KERNEL ABOVE 4.4:
On Linux kernels above 4.4 there is no longer any ATA return data in ata-passthrough mode.
Ubuntu 16.04.1 (kernel 4.4) works, but Ubuntu 16.04.2 (kernel 4. only returns SCSI sense
data. This does not have a major effect on program operation for HDDSuperClone, although
certain optimizations will not happen. But this can effect how some of the scripts work in
HDDSuperTool.

Guess I'll play with it on some old drives first, before I give it the HD in question.

I might be back with some newbie-questions...

[George-S]

Update: A simpler Program than the free HDDSuperclone is not needed. This IS a simple program, as long as you don't have to change the defaults. PLUS: It can be stopped and restarted any time.

I meanwhile set it up under Ubuntu 14.04 on the old Laptop. It has a PCMCIA-Adapter with two eSATA-Ports connected to two HDD docking stations. (According to the manual, you don't know what you are getting with USB and SATA is preferred, if available.)

The trickiest part is not mixing up source- and destination-HD, as HDDSuperclone does not display a volume label, only cryptic HD-identifier Numbers and sdb2, sdb3... Since Ubuntu supports SATA-hotplugging, you can just leave the destination-HD off until you have set the source. Or mount the target and leave the source unmounted. If you specify the target as source by mistake, it will give you an error message and ask you to unmount it.

If you have already saved some Data at the beginning of the disk, you can enter an offset under clone settings and leave the rest alone. By default, HDDSuperclone will autodetect whether it can use ATA passthrough or SCSI. Start cloning and see...

Experiments with two good disks give ~7,8 MB/sec and no error messages like device not detected. The only Warning I got came in the terminal, right after starting it with "sudo hddsuperclone":

(hddsuperclone:2596): IBUS-WARNING **: The owner of /home/gs/.config/ibus/bus is not root!

Is that critical?

Unless you advise me to change something, I would start with the damaged HD tomorrow. Unfortunately, I have cloned the first 37% using USB. HDD Raw Copy did not display an read errors, but how sure are we, that it did not copy any nonsense?

[maximus]

Don't worry about that error in the terminal, it is related to something with the GUI. As long as the program works, those cryptic errors in the terminal can be ignored.

The trickiest part is not mixing up source- and destination-HD, as HDDSuperclone does not display a volume label, only cryptic HD-identifier Numbers and sdb2, sdb3

When listing the source, it should show the model and serial number of the drive, if it can detect it. When listing a destination drive it should show a short version of the model and serial, if the information is available.

Your explanation of the issue would seem to be a weak head. I am not familiar with the raw copy tool, but if you think it copied the first 37%, then you could potentially start hddsuperclone from that point, so as to not work on the data already recovered. But if it was via a USB adapter, there is no guarantee that all data was good.

Anyway, good luck.

[George-S]

Thanks for the go-ahead, maximus.

I just tried it, but HDDsuperclone quickly gave up. It read awfully slowly (<0,5 MB/sec) and showed a high numer of skips. After a while, this error-message was displayed and it stopped:

Error: Skip Reset detected. The settings may need to be changed.
Skip size may be too low or too high.
The drive may have a slow issue causing too many slow skips.
If you got this message very quickly, it may not be reading any data.

I saved everything and shut it down. The attachment shows what the HDDsuperclone window looked like in the end:

So is there anything we can do? Different parameters? Or has the condition of the drive deteriorated so much that it is time to give up?

[maximus]

The good news is that it is still reading data without errors. The bad news is that it has an issue. I can't tell for sure, but crunching the numbers on the display would indicate to me that the drive is suffering from a "slow responding" issue, meaning there is something going on in the firmware that is causing it to read slow. I can't tell if there is a weak head or not.

Without fixing the slow reading issue, you could turn up the Skip Threshold from 1000 to 10000, and turn up the cluster size as high as it will go. That should prevent unnecessary skipping, and hopefully increase the read speed. But it will still be slow.

There are commands that can be sent to some Seagate drives using a TTL adapter that can help stabilize the drive, but I am not familiar with that, and don't know if it is possible on your particular drive or not.

I am assuming that the data isn't worth sending it to a data recovery specialist, since you have already been willing to torture the drive for 11 days.

[George-S]

Thanks for the advice maximus,
I just restarted it. First, I set it to threshold 10.000 and also to 1 retry. The maximum cluster size which it will allow is 2560.

But when I set cluster size to 2560, HDDsuperclone crashes shortly after the cloning is started. First, Ubuntu gives an error message "Problem with a system program detected". This box leaves a blank spot in the HDDsuperclone window behind. Minimizing and restoring the window results in a blank window, which can not be closed. Closing the parent terminal also does not close it.

So I restarted Ubuntu and reduced the cluster size to 2048. This worked and gave read speeds of ~1 MB/s. Then I tried to increase the cluster size to 2304 (2048 + 256), but the same crash happened again.

So I started a new cloning with cluster size 2048 from the last position where HDD Raw Copy had stopped, because in yesterday's run there had been much more skips than successful reads. Plus, I don't know what happened during the crashes. I also set the mode from Auto-Detect to ATA-Passthrough, but this seems to make no difference.

Now it is working and the total rate is ~1,3 MB/s. In the first 3 GB, it has not skipped a single time. I hope it stays like that. It estimates some 20 days for completion - I could live with that and I hope the HD can.

As for the data, it is mostly old stuff which I wanted to keep, nothing really precious. So recovery by an expert is not an option.

Once the cloning is done, it will require a lot of undeleting too, because chkdsk deleted a lot of stuff. Does anyone have tipps which programs to use for that?

Good night for now. Glad it finally works.
Georg

[northwind]

No offense but it's painful to see a drive being tortured like this.

If you send me the drive, assuming heads are ok, I will recover it for you, for free.

[RolandJS]

Please tell us, going forward, there will be a routine backup onto external media put into place, weekly or bi-monthly.

[George-S]

Dear Northwind,
that‘s a very nice offer and I was kind of perplex to see that anyone would work for free – for somebody he does not know. Thank you very much, but you don’t have to do that.

It is going now, slowly but steadily an I think I will let that go rather than taking chances sending the drive all across Europe via UPS or something. I have seen how they handle parcels. My gut feeling is that this HD is still alive a bit, but the next abuse might kill it. This guy here took several months but in the end he got it all back: [url]http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=39074&p=278443&hilit=HDD+Raw+Copy#p278443
[/url]
It has now read 94 GB without a single retry or skip:

The actual speed varies between 4 and 0,5 MB/s, the total average is 1,4. If it works like that – good enough.

Because of interest and without asking you to reveal trade-secrets: What would you do to make this go faster and smoother? And thinking about the next step: Which programs are best to do undeleting of terabytes of files on the clone?

@RolandJS: You are right, there should have been a backup. This one WAS a backup-HD, among other roles and I was kind of reluctant to backup these 3,5 TB to yet another disk. But something like that has to be. Around christmas, I also thought about replacing that 5 year old HD by a more modern, faster, less noisy one. Looks like I had better done that…

Again, thanks to all for you advice,
Georg

[MindMergepk]

No offense but it's painful to see a drive being tortured like this.

If you send me the drive, assuming heads are ok, I will recover it for you, for free.

OP can't get a better offer than this.

[pepe]

If you send me the drive, assuming heads are ok, I will recover it for you, for free.

Hey Dmitris, are you something like SRS or whatever?

Generous offer indeed...

[northwind]

Nah, I just thought it is simple case to speed this drive up and finish imaging in a day or so.
I was in a good mood when I made my offer too, obviously

@OP: There are several tricks you can do to convince a drive to speed up, but it involves professional equipment and know-how.
To your question about undeleting, your best bet would be R-Studio or UFS Explorer or DMDE or Reclaime. It depends on what FS you have. All of them have free demo versions so you can see the result before deciding to pay.

[unknown]

Never reply when you are angry.
Never make a promise when you are happy.
Never make a decision when you are sad.
Never offer a DR job for free when you are in a good mood.

In my experience when I trying to help people for free it's often ( almost always ) turning into nightmare. ( weak head/s - degradation....etc )

Some people often ( almost always ) not appreciate your free help.

[northwind]

Well, sometimes, when I'm bored, in a good mood and interested, or client doesn't have enough money, I do recoveries for free. Combination of these terms must apply.
Sometimes I got funny/ungrateful responses, but usually they're good
My biz partners get angry at me sometimes but it spices up everyday life...

[RolandJS]

"...Never offer a DR job for free when you are in a good mood..." I had to smile at this! NotAlwaysRight.com and ClientsFromHell.net often carry stories about, in short, being punished for good deed(s).

[pepe]

In my experience when I trying to help people for free it's often ( almost always ) turning into nightmare. ( weak head/s - degradation....etc )

i ran into that problem too a few years ago...
But i have just helped out a guy having a dropped Adata external drive which had broken USB connector (the cable prevented the drive falling to the GND) and the drive was in good condition otherwise. I have him an USB pcb from another box and he was happy with it.
There are cases when it won't harm anybody...

being punished for good deed(s).

Of course, some people are jerks anyway, but those won't be happy either way.