I have a 1TB Seagate Desktop HDD which was failing (It started throwing gibberish characters on screen, had a ridiculously slow copy speed, etc). I swapped out the HDD and reinstalled windows on a spare HDD and tried to connect this as is internally. However, my PC wouldnt boot with this particular HDD connected but boot with the replacement drive.
I connected this via an external HDD dock that i have and the drive booted up and showed ALL my data and partitions. I still could not copy data out due to the extremely low copy speed so i decided to give this a clone.
I used the cloning feature of the dock i have (orico) but it would only clone the first partition which was the system reserved partition. I then attempted the clone/imaging via Macrium Reflect but it threw me an error "clone failed error 0 read failed 9 bad file descriptor" and advised me to run chkdsk on C: (Noob mistake , i know). I ran the chkdsk but it was on stage 0 , 1-2% for over 2 hours hence cancelled it by Ctrl+C (Blunder, I know).

After this my HDD would even though get detected on windows but it would say "It needs to be formatted" in order to use it. This is when i stumbled across HDDGuru's HDD Raw Copy tool and did a clone of the erroneous drive on a fresh (formatted) Seagate drive. The process took 4 days to complete. However, when i am putting this drive into the dock , no partition shows up on win explorer. Disk management shows it up as "unknown" and "unallocated". Attaching screenshot for your reference.


I have downloaded DMDE and the quick scan showed up individual partitions but i couldn't expand those upon load so i have hit a full scan as i type this (Screenshot attached for both)





The drive contains a lot of critical data and I would want to recover it somehow! Would be grateful for any help /guidance

1/ You should have used a tool which understands how to clone a drive with bad heads or media. Two recommended tools are HDDSuperClone and ddrescue. HDDGuru's HDD Raw Copy tool is unsuitable for this purpose. Both HDDSuperClone and ddrescue maintain a log, so they can resume after an interruption. The log can also be used to determine which files contain unreadable sectors.

2/ You have allowed Windows to initialise your drive. This was data destructive (but not terminally so).

3/ On your clone, use DMDE to restore the boot sectors for the System Reserved partition, Partition 2 and Partition 3. Select each of these partitions, r-click them and select "Restore Boot Sector from Copy". Partition 1 ($Noname 07) cannot be recovered in this way because there is no copy of the boot sector.

4/ R-click each of the above partitions, including Partition 1, and select "Insert the Partition (Undelete).

Apply Changes and reboot. Hopefully the OS will now see all your partitions, except partition 1.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

1. Completely agreed.
2. When you say initialize do you simply mean connect? Cause I did not initialize the clone HDD that was showing up as unknown. I read that it equals a format and did not go ahead with that

Let me try 3 and 4 and come back.

Alternatively posting the Crystal screenshot of the faulty HDD. From what i read up about the 3 caution signs- Its completely kaput right?

None of your partitions has a boot sector, and none has an entry in the partition table in sector 0. This suggests that Windows initialised your drive. This is what Windows does when it wipes the existing files systems and prepares to rebuild your drive as if it were empty.

Your SMART report is BAD. The drive has one foot in the grave. Hopefully your clone has most of your needed data.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.