Hi People,

I have a 500GB NTFS formatted Samsung HM500LI in an external USB enclosure. I dropped it TWICE in 5 minutes. Tile floor too, not carpet. It's my backup - so its not too critical, but it has about 300GB of movies I'd like to get back.

After dropping, it wouldn't immediately spin up, but after a bit of tapping with my knuckle, it started up and seemed to be fine. I noticed some file corruption - CRC read errors, which were presumably bad sectors from some surface scratching or something, and started looking around for a something which would map out the bad sectors and have a go at recovering the data in them. Found something called 'HDD regenerator', which has caused me much grief.

An ordinary (no surface scan) check came back with no errors. I didn't try the XP surface scan, since I wanted to make a best-effort recovery of those sectors if possible.

HDD Regenerator can be run from XP, and gives a choice of scan-and-attempt-to-repair, or (next line) scan ONLY. I took the second option, not wanting to alter anything on the drive at that point, and let it run for a little while - it got up to about 20000 sectors, with 20001 bad sectors. Always one more for some idiot reason. Didn't look good, so I stopped it.

Now the HDD cannot be seen at all. I have attached it directly to a desktop PC, no enclosure, and it behaves the same.

At startup it spins up, and the PC takes a long time to boot, eventually giving up and winding down. If I hit reset (not power down) after a while it spins up, and once in a while stays spinning. If I run Samsungs HUTIL, it can see the drive sometimes - if its spinning. Just now it won't see it.

My question is: Before running HDD Regenerator, I could get at my disk, now I cannot. This appears to be low level damage, and it is something HDD Regen did to the disk. Any ideas what happened? And is there any way to get it back to what it was?

Are there any such things as low level copiers to create an image file? (linux DD springs to mind)

What kind of a reputation does 'HDD Regenerator' have, anyway?

Sorry to hear this one. Sounds like heads stuck to the platter on this one and there could also be a chance of alignment. But you say it was working some but taking long time on this one. Now you have run some sort of program on it and now there is even more damage on it. First off if you had the chance to get it spinning and recognized you should of cloned it right away to another drive. Looks like you have caused more damage to this drive in your DIY attempt on it.

You have two choices. Send it in for repair - but for movies is it worth this one to you

Second - count your loss - buy a new drive - ask all your friends for their films again - start over.

If lucky you might try and clone it to another drive but looks like your chance on this one is all but gone now.

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Iorana Haraharaini

should have stopped at 1st drop. At least media damage has occurred, as data is not important and the cost is low, replace drive.

Actually, it was working fine after dropping it, just some files were taking a long time and coming back with CRC errors. Except for that, seemed to be nothing wrong.

What I'm GUESSING is alignment (like you said) and the 'test-but-don't-write' function in HDD Regen actually DID write back. With an alignment problem, what HDD Regen's blurb says it does looks pretty fatal to me. It shouldn't have writ back though, I was careful to pick the function which should not have done anything to the disk. SERIOUS bug that (understating the point)

So, what did HDD Regen do? is this what happens if you do a surface scan with misaligned heads? (As I understand it a surface scan does a read-write-read on every sector of a drive)

[I'm in the process of recovering those movies from friends now - suddenly another excellent reason to share media, distributed low-cost backups! Never thought of that before!]

I think perhaps I'm not being clear?

I dropped my 500GB Samsung external HDD. It was still working fine for about 2 days after that, reading and writing, though some files would not read: CRC errors was reported on failure.

I figured to run a surface scan with a decent attempt at recovering the bad sectors. Chose HDD Regenerator to do that.

After a test run (which should not have written to the disk) I can no longer access the HDD. It will spin up, then shutdown after about a minute of trying to start. If I reset without powering down once or twice, it will often remain powered up. HUTIL will sometimes see the drive and sometimes not, even though it is still spun up when I run HUTIL - HUTIL takes a long time to scan devices.

Trying to start a self-test with HUTIL has got nothing, it just comes back straight away with no results.

My choices are to:

1) send in for recovery (not really worth it)
2) try a low-level format (about 50-50 I'll get a working disk out of that - wouldn't trust it much)
3) Long term project to extract the data from it (done successfully with a 20GB HDD about 2005 with similar symptoms)

I'm learning towards 3 right now. I don't want to get into board swaps or into the platters/heads themselves, I'm not that keen. At this point I still believe low-level software access is still possible. Beginning with attempting to image the drive - which will have to wait for me to get a drive which is bigger than 500GB I think.

I am looking to get at the console on the HDD: is documentation on the use of that console available somewhere?

Software wise, what would people here recommend? MHDD?

NB: I am an electronic/embedded systems engineer by trade, so nothing here (OUTSIDE the heads/platters module) is foreign to me, and have done this successfully with a 20GB drive back in 2005 as mentioned. Didn't drop that one. It just - like - failed.

No console neither software can help you, as it is no longer recognised. And the drive suffered a trauma, so even if you manage to kickstart it, it won't be utilizable for reliable storage.

It was working for 2 days after dropping it, I didn't lose access to it til I ran 'HDD regenerator'. HDD regenerator is software, and I am not convinced it has done physical damage to the drive - so I think it could be made visible - at least as an 'unformatted drive', surely?

Unless somehow 'HDD Regen' wrote to some critical areas somewhere - perhaps calibration ROM or service areas on the disk?

Can somebody give me a clue as to what has actually happened here?

Yes, I dropped the drive. There was physical damage appearing as bad sectors. But I didn't lose it until two days later when I ran 'HDD Regenerator' (Dmitriy Primochenko Online)

Let's say I sent it to a recovery professional, what would they do first? Straight onto a PC-3000 or something and image it? Would there be any preliminary attempts to resurrect the drive before that?

pc3000 is nothing without a brain driving it and there is most probably something else. Summing up, you need pro help.

You talking about the OPs brain, or the fact that it needs to be plugged into a PC and software installed?

As I noted, I am an embedded systems/electronics engineer by trade, so I could probably do the job, given the right tools.

So instead of saying it 'it can't be done by you' - send us the drive and your money. Not a useful answer.

Try saying 'you need to do this, and you need these tools - can you do it?'. Which would be a useful answer.



And saying 'if you can't, we could do it for you' you might just get my business. As an embedded/electronics engineer of 30 years experience, working in military/aerospace/satellite, I DO appreciate the value of skill and experience here.

Is anybody going to answer the questions? or is this what I am starting to think it is, just a forum to drum up business, give nothing away for free.

If you want my business, I'm going to know what I'm paying for.

I'll find out if its worth doing by getting answers to my questions.

Anybody able to indicate a reputable data recovery company in Thailand (specifically Chiang Mai) area?

It probably ain't worth it, but I want to know options/costs against future problems, and to be able to advise my own clients.

Personally I do not believe that the software you ran on this drive had anything to do with the failure of it. When a drive is dropped you risk the chance of the platters becoming out of alignment. Which in this case is very difficult even for a seasoned pro to align them again. Second when a drive is dropped and it is running the heads can hit the platters. Most of the time they can stick or leaves scratches on the platters. So in running your software you might of hit one of them. You also have or could have damage to the spindle motor. In such case when a drive is dropped the first things to do is see what internal damage there is on this drive. This is determined in a clean room by opening up the drive. The more the drive is run the higher the risk for more damage to the surface of the disk platters.

All in all short of giving a long drawn out explaination on this one. You need to determine initial damage. Either repair it if possible; if not possible; you have to transplant the platters to a new chassis on this one. If platters are mis aligned then comes the fun part trying to align them up again so that you can read them correctly.

This is why we say it is very difficult to do this one and get back the data off a dropped drive.

The PC3000 is a tool to be used to determine problems on the SA zone of the HDD, heads, and other things. This tool can not fix all problems and it is a complicated tools to use and use correctly. There are a lot of options in this tool and some can kill your drive forever if you are not careful. That is why they said OP needs brain to work on this tool. It is not just the brain it is the years of knowledge of how the HDD works from the inside out on this one. What can go wrong will go wrong and what you fixed on one will not allow you to fix on another one. Each drive that breaks is unique and needs to be handle as such.

After a failure most people run to software solution to get back their data. This one can be more dangerous than trying to clone it and work from the clone of your drive.

Other such explainations and descriptions of the tools has been discuessed here in the forum many times over and I am sure you could find some other answers to what you want in the search function here.

Maybe this can give you a better idea of what is wrong and why your drive is dying now and no longer can see your data. The special tools are here to assist in the recovery of the data and it is not a magic one button push and your data is back in a new drive for you.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Thank you Poehere! That is a much more useful answer.

I can see SMART is enabled on this drive, and during boot-up I see:

SATA 1 : ... S.M.A.R.T. Capable but Disabled (for the primary drive - good HDD)
SATA 3 : ... S.M.A.R.T. Capable and Status BAD (for the failed drive)

So I can guess that the functions used by 'HDD Regenerator' coupled with real physical damage has taken the drive over the thresholds in SMART?

If I disable SMART function, might I get back to a readable (but rapidly failing) drive - something that might work long enough to clone an image from?

The fact that your hard drive ran for a few days suggests that you don't have a platter alignment issue. You may, however, have created head alignment issues.

My guess is that the heads slapped the platters, causing physical damage.

When you ran a program like HDD Regenerator, you are scanning the disk from stem to stern. If there is physical damage to the media, then this process will invariably run the heads over the bad spot, and risk killing the heads. Running a drive in this condition can generate microscopic debris (remember the telescopic shots of the Shoemaker-Levy comet smashing into Jupiter?) that will further contaminate the drive and ruin more heads and surfaces.

Moreover, since you did not turn off SMART or auto-reassignment of bad sectors, you ran the risk of filling up the defect and SMART logs to overflow, which can spill over and corrupt the other software modules.

Your best bet would have been to IMMEDIATELY do a sector-by-sector image of the drive, and recover your data from the target drive. I'm afraid now it's เกมมากกว่า!

Jono

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

answer is no.

That is in line with the kinds of problems I was seeing after dropping it, and before running HDD Regen.

I didn't let HDD Regen run anywhere near to completion, it got to something like 20000 sectors (of some 900000000 or so) before I gave up on it - it was saying every sector+1 was bad. But I guess thats by-the-by.

Now THAT is something worth knowing. And again in line with the symptoms. Wouldn't
HDD Regen be clever enough to turn off auto-reassignment though? Given the way it claims to work?


You know Thai?

I don't know Thai (Google Translate is awesome, yes?).

I don't use HDD Regenerator but AFAIK it has to be able to manage defect list(s).

Jono

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http://www.datasaversllc.com