Hello,

I got this drive (details below) three days ago in order to "ddrescue" it. (I'm using Ubuntu Quantal 12.10.) It ran properly for a while. It rescued around 12Gb out of 500. Suddenly, the drive "disappeared", making ddrescue running fast forward without reading anything. Although /dev/sdc and /dev/sdc1 were still present, "fdisk -l" reported nothing for it. Until then, gsmartcontrol reported it as "bad".

I restarted system and BIOS did not detect it. So, I switched it off then on and BIOS saw it again. I checked status again with fdisk and gsmartcontrol then I ran ddrescue. It hanged on the first bad sector, then the "disappearance scenario" started again. So, I repeated a few times what you read in this paragraph (power off, fdisk, gsmartcontrol, ddrescue).

Finally, the drive is found by the BIOS but gsmartcontrol report it as an Unknown Model of 600Pb with good SMART status and fdisk does not find anything for it. I wanted to see whether there were life through the terminal. It told me:



If I hit Ctrl+Z, nothing happens.

Additionally, if i put the drive in my eSATA dockstation on OSX, this drive and its partition are found. Before SMART reports bad data, the label of the partition was found too. Now, it is not anymore.

What could I do with this drive ?

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Nothing.
This was the scenario where DDI or similar could have worked with a preliminar check. Quite sure this drive was shocked.

Thanks, BlackST.

That is what I thought.

What kind of preliminar check do you mean ?
The owner told it has never fallen, been shocked or whatever.

Check of media, heads...

I don't have any professional equipment. I just try to help some friends with my limited knowledge. Until now, ddrescue did the job.

Hi Jarvis,
Could you share this case for us?
Thanks in advance.

Hi Nicolas,

If I don't find help here, the case is closed. I can't get any sector out of this drive anymore. Of course, I can't afford those expensive tools. It seems the mission won't succeed without at least one of them.

But if a miracle occurs, I'll tell it here.

The miracle would be resurrecting the drive...

It sounds like a pleonasm to me.

To conclude, I would say that Seagate and WD don't worth a cent. (I had an external 2TB WD drive about one year ago who died after 170 hours of work.) I still have never seen a Samsung failing yet. I buy Samsung drives since ten years ago. It's sad that consumers can't know what there is inside their external drive.

Not true.

I have seen Samsungs die in my hands after few weeks of work and no stressful conditions at all and I have WDs running flawlessly (on controlled environment) fro years 24/7 , also Seagate are well built and engineered. Everything is relative....

BlackST posso chiederti che modello di hard disk utilizzi tu?
Quali ritieni siano più affidabili?

Seagate, Samsung, WD, Hitachi, o cosa?


BlackST can i ask you which hard drives do you use?
Which are the best hard drive in the market?

Seagate, Samsung, WD, Hitachi, or what?

_________________
My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI

There is no rule as to which is the 'best' hard drive in the market.
Some drives are better designed, some have a lot of problems with fw and temperatures due to the way they are designed etc.

If you ask ten pro's you will get 10 different opinions.
For 3.5" I only use WD RE edition.
For 2.5" I use Scorpio Black or Fujitsus or some models of Toshibas.

_________________
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