Hello,

I have an external Western Digital 2TB USB3 drive that a friend gave me to recover their data off of. The history on this drive was that it was dropped while in use off a table top to the floor. My friend indicated that the drive worked for sometime afterwards until one day it just quit. She has about 500GB of family photos, movies, and other data she absolutely needs off the drive. I informed her that based on the drive being dropped, data recovery may be unlikely, but possible. Of which she indicated to go ahead with it.

She gave it to me and I immediately and carefully removed the SATA drive from inside of it so I could connect it to a computer system to run my initial set of data recover tools. The drive itself does NOT give any motor related issues (knocking, pinging, etc). It spins up successfully, runs smoothly, and mechanically seems to be a-OK. When browsing to the drive in Windows it shows a RAW file system, but the drive itself is recognized in the Disk Manager Service.

So I proceeded to run the following software with the following results:

1.) Ran GetDataBack which started out OK, but a few minutes into it, it gave lots of sector errors and failed to look/find any data to recover.

2.) Ran the Western Digital Diagnostic tools. The quick test did not run, the long test indicated too many bad sectors to repair, and the test quit.

3.) I went to trusty SpinRite, however it failed shortly after starting with the failed message (which I'm finding out is due to a bug with SpinRite on drives larger than 640GB).

4.) I ran HDAT found on Hiren's BootCD to perform the same sector recovery process, except it was going so exceptionally slow for 3 days non stop with no sectors recovered.

5.) After researching, I discovered MHDD and after a day long scan, the visual map of sectors indicated that there are two groups of bad sectors. One at the beginning, and one at the end of the drive. Each group looks to contain thousands upon thousands of bad sectors, but still an overall small percentage of the overall space of the drive.

6.) Next I proceeded to use Acronics True Image Home to do a sector by sector image from this 2TB drive to an available 3TB drive. However after nearly 4 days Acronis showed no movement in the software indicating any sort of backup had happened or was happening.

Lastly, I discovered HDD RAW Copy Tool. I started it last night and after about 12 hours, it shows 0.0% copied. In fact the log window every few hours gives the following, "Read Error occurred at offset 3,091,136,512; LBA 6,037,376 (The semaphore timeout period...)" When reading the documentation for HDD Raw Copy Tool, it indicated it would skip bad sectors to copy the data from good sectors. However it seems like this tool is in fact trying to read the bad sectors. Am I missing something here?

Or do I just need to wait a really long time for this 2TB drive to be read? Once I can get past the bad sectors it should grab that data just fine. Also the indicator light on the PC shows that the HDD activity is constant, so as far as I know it hasn't stalled.

Help?! Advice? Thoughts?!

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Its surprising the disk is still alive. you say it seems "A-OK" but it was working fine, it fell, then its not working - obviously this is a result of the physical fall. The amount of strain you have placed the HDD under, in addition to the poor choice of software, you have very likely (pretty much guaranteed) to have made things worse. Initially, the recovery could have been relatively straightforward in the hands of a professional.

Also, if data is important it would have been an idea to come to this forum first where you would have been advised not to run software like GetDataBack and SpinRite which are not suitable for your situation.

Also, the pattern you see in MHDD I would guess it relates to a failed head not patches of unreadable sectors.

You should advise your friend that this is beyond you and tell her to send it to a professional as the data is absolutely needed.

I appreciate your critical overview and analysis of data recovery attempts on this hard drive. Tho maybe I should have said it up front, is that I'm not some fly by night clueless PC rookie trying to do something for a friend.

I run a computer business doing consulting, repair, installation work for businesses and home users alike. While I admit I am not a full on data recovery laboratory (Not what my business is geared towards anyway) with clean rooms available to disassemble a drive for recovery, I am a certified professional in the computer industry who has performed data recoveries within the realm of my capabilities in the past. In fact the tools I listed above have been very successful over the past 15 years of business giving not a perfect, but good success rate for recovering lost data on an emergency notice. Also, in that 15 years of operation as a reputable business, I've only seen 3 customers ever actually go to a data recovery specialist due to the cost factor of recoveries being in the $1000+ price ranges. Instead customers would rather loose data than spend that price on their data, and yes businesses have told me they don't want to pay that either.

So in this event I was using over a decade worth of knowledge and tools to get to as much data for this friend/customer as quick as possible and with the results that I had, I came here for any further advice in seeking what could be done for this drive and a recovery that is within my realm. Not criticism and bashing over incorrectly perceived incapabilities on my part.

PC consulting, repair and installation is a whole different thing to data recovery. Professional with a decade of knowledge or not, your actions on this failing drive were irresponsible and have seriously complicated its recover-ability.

this is exactly what is frustrating in this industry. You have experience in computer repair, this qualifies you to take on data recovery jobs? Its like a dentist deciding to take on a liver transplant - its not going to work.

I appreciate you are not clueless and Im sure you have some level of knowledge that may be relative to data recovery, but this case cant be recovered with software applications and your attempts to do so will have made it worse.

Hi bawalker,
Though it's visible that you were well intentioned in trying to help a friend the steps you mention indicate that you do not have the requisite experience in data recovery to be of anything but a hazard to someones equipment or data.
This is not meant to be insulting, just a statement of fact based upon what you write here.

With the greatest respect for what you do as a professional, that experience does not translate well into data recovery services

acknowledging hddguys reply maybe i could elaborate.


The disk is mounted and write enabled.
Windows will try and correct anything it deems to be wrong. It may not be wrong but if Windows thinks it is, it will screw your data in order to bring sanity back to itself.

So, given that the drive may have suffered damage in a fall you are possibly grinding more damage into the disk.
Windows at the same time may be trying to intervene.

burn babeh burn. bad head? now a crippled disk or a grooved disk.Pixeldust.

Spinrite has no place in a data recovery toolbag. It makes changes to the disk being operated on.


More thrash

You certainly have persistence.


Shouting at a deaf person ...... you are working hard to no effect ..... other than to kill the drive or annoy deaf person.


Yes: Go and read up thoroughly about data recovery. start with the sites that manufacture equipment and then trawl Fora like this one and pick up hints and tips if you intend to proceed on the course of checking drives even just for friends.

Instead of railing against criticism here, take it as a gift of good advice from people that do this as their livelihood, and not as a personal attack.

Constructively. possibly the best step you took was the WD diag tool.
It should have ended there or after MHDD started showing faults you don't understand.
What were the codes? AMNF ERR ABRT ? Warnings or delays or what?

Members here see this scenario time and time again. The answers are always the same hence the abrupt manner of some. Nothing personal.

Kern

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Okay...up until now, you can claim ignorance. But, as of today, you are in the know.

1. Always, always assess the drive, based on the cause of the failure. If anything, assume physical failure and work from there.
2. Resolve physical issues (change heads, replace PCB, fix firmware, etc)
3. Get a full sector-by-sector clone of the failing drive with a tool that is capable of handling bad sectors and can go back and target those sectors later
4. Run data recovery programs against the clone only
5. Recover the data to a new hard drive and never back to the original or the clone
6. Verify that the data is 100% healthy

A few things that should never be done:

1. Never run programs like SpinRite, HDDRegen or chkdsk on a failing drive (unless it is 100% cloned/backed up)
2. Never freeze a drive
3. Never tap a drive with a hammer
4. Never recover data back to the original drive (I suggest that this is even true if you are recovering deleted data from a healthy drive)
5. Never run data recovery programs against a failing hard drive
6. Never run drive diagnostic programs against a failing drive until a full clone has been acquired and verified

It is because of how most computer shops like to mess around with their client's drives before presenting them with the options for professional data recovery services, my company has just started promoting re-sellers who use our services and protect their clients data. So, now if a client asks if we have a computer technician that we recommend in their area, we have a list of shops that we know won't kill the client's drive before giving us a call for advice.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Fab post Luke. surely worth a #sticky someplace.

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Когда хочется кушать – съешь всё.
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All you can do now is to clone the hdd to another drive with ddrescue.
After that you can try to recover from the copy.

_________________
data recovery Poland

So many things wrong in your initial assessment and your follow up post. The company I work for, in addition to our normal work load, gets 5 to 10 jobs per week that have been screwed around with by "certified" pc techs and consultants. When dealing with hard drives that's kind of like having a dentist remove a brain tumor. There is absolutely no correlation between the two.

Please, accept the fact that you are not a data recovery technician. Please stop taking chances with people's data. If they say they don't care about getting the data back, then ya...maybe then you can jack around with it and give it a shot. Just because you think you know what you are doing does not mean you are able to do it. I'm one of the low men on the totem pole at the lab I work for. I don't pretend to know what some of the other guys know, and there is a reason why they get paid the big $$$. Stop being one of those people that thinks just because they can install a new motherboard or troubleshoot virus issues, that you are suddenly able to put people's data at risk by monkeying around with it using lazy off the shelf software.

Don't try to learn this business, unless you are willing to do so on your own drives. Don't experiment on your customer's hard drives. Don't take a customer's drive who may have years and years worth of family pictures and start screwing around with it. If you really want to be a good steward, tell them there are professionals who can help them. Yes, tell them a physical recovery can be $700 to $1,200+...but also tell them if their data is critical they can always just safely store the drive somewhere and save up for a few months until they can afford it. That would be the noble and respectable thing to do, and chances are, it's probably not even something your customers even considered.

If I sound little pissed, it's because I am. Not at you personally, but at people like you. Do you know how sickening it is to open a drive that was push beyond it's limits to the point that the platters became damaged because some fool was running spinrite on a failing drive? A drive that might have had a head failure that was recoverable initially, but they were "the experts" and they knew they could get the data back by just scanning it and running some POS software. When in reality, all they did was take a bad situation and make it worse. Do you know how sickening it is to hear a mother cry on the phone, because someone from our office has to tell them that their computer repair tech who worked on their drive first completely ruined any chances of a recovery? Hell even our company refers jobs out to other data recovery companies if it's something we are just having a hard time with.

I wish people like you would realize that what you do is devastating to people. You take advantage of your customers who don't know any better, and they look to you as being an expert. They put their trust in you, and you let them down when you do things beyond the scope of your expertise. You aren't saving them ANYTHING. Unless the data is crap, or replaceable, you aren't saving them a damn thing by working on it yourself. I'm sick of seeing drives that have finger prints all over them. I'm sick of seeing drives that are sent in with the platters safely tucked away in a ziplock bag. I'm sick of hearing from techs that call saying "well the drive was reading really slowly and then it started clicking, so I put it in the freezer and tried to scan it again for 2 days but it just kept clicking". Then you get these drives in and you find out from the customer that it's THEIR LIFE on there!!! Pictures from the time their kids were born, wedding photos, photos of deceased relatives, documents, journals, spreadsheets for businesses. All gone because someone who had some worthless certification thought they had all the answers, and unfortunately their customer believed them.

The arrogance - it makes me wanna barf. It kinda reminds me when I was green, lime-green, and I had like 6 years experience cracking and patching and copying Apple II games. Man.. I was like so good I made my 300 baud modem work at T1 speeds! I got so full of myself I went to apply for job at a major satellite manufacturer, thinking I could program anything and fix anything. I got booted out of there faster than a head crash on a dropped drive!

You need to do the right thing. Man up and contact a genuine data recovery firm, one that has worked with thousands of disks and has a reputation built up. You need to give this disk to them and you need to help cover the costs for your original client. If you do not, it will be one tiny mistake in your work history you'll try to forget, but never will. It will haunt you every time you're asked to look at a bad disk.

These days I lean more toward preventative measures and backups. One time when one of my services & backup plans exploded I paid for pro recovery. And I still have the customer's loyalty and plenty of recommendations. And no lost data. I didn't effect the recovery/repair myself - I was too busy with other things to concentrate in an effective manner that would have saved the day. So a pro called a pro.

This whole thread is an excellent example, and it is genuine too. It shows exactly how consultants and "certified" technicians handle data recovery. They hope they get lucky and perform a task that can bring in $500, by using a few simple bits of software or cowboy tricks. They're just as bad as the ones that throw away parts of the external housing. I'll never understand that reasoning.

Where is the respect and professionalism? I would much rather have a tech tell me the job is one step up from his/her capabilities and refuse the assignment. Much rather have that then someone blindly playing around and mucking stuff up and making things worse.

I would also hire the tech that recognizes his limits much sooner than one that seems to be a miracle worker.

Harsh? yes True? yes

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.

It's not until you truly make the quantum leap from PC Repair Professional to DR Professional that you realize how true this statement is....

_________________
East Anglian Data Recovery Services
http://www.eadr.co.uk

"If it's your only copy - then it's not a backup!"

Arrogant & "certified" pc techs : yup. Cert Co;s breed that arrogance too.

Far too many orgs selling certs instead of proper training, and that ranges across the board from martial arts grades thro to MS Tech, forensic & security accreditations.
Multi choice exam ffs. stick a pin. Degree exam: 2 questions 3 hrs here's a pen.

Wayback I got a "cert" took me 4 yrs+ in Uni and work placement to get.
Honest enough to admit that it isn't worth arse-wipe in terms of DR.
There is no substitute for hands on experience.

DIY Wannabe?
Start with free opensource s/w, buy drives off ebay, roll your sleeves up, off you go.
Cut the plugs off things like the TV, bin World of Warcraft.
Ditch the pr0n too, you'll find enough of that on S/H drives. >.<

Still stoked?
Buy some hardware and pro s/w and play with that, for a good long time.

Can't be bothered with the long term time and financial commitment?
Outsource to someone that could.

Simples clhkc!

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Когда хочется кушать – съешь всё.
Голод не тётка!