Woke up one morning after wind storms passed through, causing power issues throughout the area. My place may have lost power while I was asleep because my computer was off and I leave it on 24/7.

When I booted up, it took a while and when I finally got into Windows, I couldn't see one of my secondary drives, which is the one I'm writing about.

It's a Seagate ST3000DM001, 1CH166-302, CC26, 1332 H

I've done a PCB swap (also swapped ROM chips) with a board from Donor Drives but this hasn't done much for me.

Drive spins up and stays that way. I don't detect any odd sounds.

The drive basically causes the computer to be extremely slow whenever trying to access it. I initially had problems detecting the drive and it still occasionally requires me to unplug and replug the power and rescan in Disk Management to get it to be detected. I did do this once before I enabled hotswap in the BIOS of my ASUS Sabertooth (I thought it was enabled), but not sure if that would cause an issue.

I get read errors in a lot of tools I've tried to use, which precludes their use. I also haven't been able to have the drive seen by any of the SMART tools like Crystal Disk Info or the Seatools for Windows, even though Windows lists the disk in Device Manager and Disk Management.

Sometimes I can get the drive to display the directory contents in Windows Explorer, but most of the time I can't and it just hangs. Even if I get it to display the contents, copying large amounts of data or even any data really is almost impossible using Windows Explorer although I did manage to get about 3GB from it once and a few files here and there since then. Essentially, if I hit the wrong file/sector, I think the drive gets stuck retrying or something. Even navigating the directory tree is difficult as I never know when it's going to just hang on me.

Other times, the drive will show up as blank in Windows Explorer. Chkdsk at the time thought it was a raw disk, although it was reported as an NTFS file system in Disk Management. I think it's an intermittent issue with failed reads, however, as since then I've been able to see the file system come up just fine...

I did run chkdsk up to about 52% but it was moving so slow that I decided to stop it so I could diagnose further. I kept getting "File segment xxx is unreadable" repeatedly, just counting upward extremely slowly. I let it run for 36+ hours.

Btw, I have it mounted on a separate drive letter that shouldn't be touched by my machine while I attempt to get my data back. 95% of the data on the drive is unimportant, but I'd like to get the 5% that is.

I'm currently connected to terminal and I can get F3. I know nothing of commands though. Can anyone help diagnose?

Here's the output:



Note that some of the missing/inappropriate characters ("Qeset") may be due to the fact that I don't have a common ground between my USB->serial interface and the drive.

Running chkdsk was a very, very, very bad idea.

Your drive most probably suffers from a damaged/weak head and that explains why it can only read partially. It also explains why the behavior is so unstable.
This is just a remote diagnostic, but I think this is the culprit.

Having said that, there are two options for you, depending on how critical that 5% of the desired data is to you:
a) DO NOT POWER UP the drive again and consult a DR professional in your area.
b) Use some non-windows software like ddrescue that knows how to work around the bad areas of the drive, and make an image of the drive. Then, work with the image and see what was recovered. Be warned though, that if my assumption is correct and the head(s) of the drive is unstable, this solution can (and most likely will) cause the heads to fail completely, causing IRREVERSIBLE damage to the drive and render it unrecoverable, even by a pro. It's your data, your choice, as always. Also, keep in mind that even if this procedure is successful, and the drive images without problems (unlikely, but..), then there is a big a chance that chkdsk has scrambled your data in a way that they are now useless. Just sayin'.

Good luck.

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Thanks for your input. I agree with you that running chkdsk was not the best idea in hindsight but at the time I thought it might clear up the issue. However, the behavior of the drive since running chkdsk hasn't changed so I think I may have narrowly escaped doom in this case.

I have a strong suspicion that the platters and the file system are intact because I've been able to recover perfectly usable data WHEN the drive would finally let me copy files from it and I've never heard any sounds coming from it that would indicate platter damage. I've also been able to see the entire directory structure and navigate parts of it multiple times if I was patient enough to wait until it finally shows up.

I also hear and feel the heads moving from park to the platter during power up and from the platter to park during power down without any strange noises so it would seem they are at least getting there and back okay.

Whether they are reading properly or not is another matter.

Can anyone help me diagnose what may be wrong so I can target any future efforts to help this drive? I'd like to continue DIY but not anything high-risk as I'd like to reserve the option of sending to a data recovery pro. Btw, if anyone has any recommendations, I'm in the USA in the Portland, OR area.

These drives are absolutely horrible to work with. The more you power it on, the higher the odds that it will completely crash, making a project that may be less than $500 and making it a project that costs more than $1000 and may not be recoverable at all.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

I've seen no symptoms pointing to physical damage other than the intermittent read failures... But couldn't this be caused by logical damage?

Is there anything I can do from terminal to help diagnose?