hdd 5min. working than dead on and off?(barracuda 7200.12)

[joonas]

did you guys experience a hdd working relativly fine for a 1-15minutes mintues periode in which i copy about 1to15GB every time and then again beeing dead, on and off?

its then staying dead until i was trying various things like moving it around/reconnecting the cable/rebooting. sometimes it stays dead quite a while and then by accident it works again. and i ddrescue a few more GBs. but working like this it may takes me a few 100 working hours to get the full 1TB.image

its a seagate barracuda 7200.12, its all the data i personally collected:(

it was an external drive running 6500 hours makeing clicking noises since it was new.

windows XP now sais "drive not formated" and tends to crash.

since i disabled all windows autorun. ddrescue on cgywin finds it and starts copying but only when connected to usb not when connected to sata. it copies with relativly healty noises and 20mb/s

The same is for testdisk. since i wrote testdisk master record to the disk testdisk even finds the file structure but it does not allow to continue copying files where it left of the last try (does testdisk support this?)

(i wonder if linux with not mounted drive or if possivle mounted read only would have chances to work much better or if ddrescue on cgywin on windows XP is just as fine? - its mounted with a drive letter by windows but unlike for the other drives cgywin does not use that drive letter and but "df" command loads quite a while and does not show the drive. but ddrescue ... /dev/sdc ... works sometimes as said before)

and last questions is this a "standardizable" behaviour?
do many harddrives do that is there a standarizeable solution?

many smiles and a thausand thanks in advance

[labtech]

Seems to me a like a somewhat common issue with Seagate drives. In order to be able to get a continuous image without interruption you need some sort of professional imaging tool (expensive) that works with the drive directly (outside of Windows).

Unless there are more severe issues with the drive (to determine based on a more advanced diagnosis) and the data is important, I suggest you talk to a good data recovery company. With the right equipment, it should be only a couple of hundred dollars.

[joonas]

thanks

still im interssed in the theory what exactly causes this behavior of the drive - maybe its enough to change the hddboard?

also there cant be much differnce between ddrescue and such hardware tools.

only if its and error that isnt that bad acctually but makes it appear dead to windows?

but in this case there must be any alternative like a harddisk rescue boot disk with better software?


kind regards

[Vulcan]

also there cant be much differnce between ddrescue and such hardware tools.

Oh yes, there is "much difference" in some specific functionality. You can research hardware tools like Deepspar Disk Imager (DDI) for more details. I agree with the previous comments from labtech.

[Edited to add: Of course there are other h/w imagers like the Atola range also ]

Many of the details in your original posting are unclear to me, due to language / translation difficulties, and I don't have time to try to discuss all the unclear points. Here is one example - are you saying that the drive powers off/on itself? Or are you saying that you need to power the drive off/on, to continue the cloning with ddrescue, after you start to see errors?

I would be interested to see the full raw SMART data from the disk (e.g. install smartmontools on Windows (not cygwin) or Linux - use "smartctl -a /dev/ZZZ > /smartctl.txt" where /dev/ZZZ is the device node for the "problem" raw disk on your system).

FYI, I would not use ddrescue under cygwin, since you are then still affected by the behaviour of Windows drivers, although in your specific case, this may not be making a significant difference.