Hello

Yesterday the hard drive on my laptop died. It is a Samsung HM500JI drive. Here's what happened:

The last two weeks or so, my computer has been getting worse and worse. First I started getting BSODs, most of them saying something like "kernel data inpage error". I would get them maybe once or twice every day. Then about a week ago it got worse. The first thing I noticed was that whenever I hit the windows key and did a search for a program my system would stop responding until I cancelled the search by hitting escape. I just figured that something was wrong with windows, so I stopped using the search knowing that I had planned a reinstall of windows anyway. Then a few days later, it started to get REALLY bad. After typing my password it could take 10 minutes for windows to be ready. Opening a program could take several minutes, however, once a program did finish opening it would mostly run smoothly.

After about two days of this my computer shut down and it wouldn't start up again because it couldn't find a hard drive. I went out to get a new one, and now everything is running again, BUT I would like to make an attempt at recovering the data. It is not critical since most of the important data can be recreated (although I would take some time ). So I don't think I am interested in having this done professionally.

So my questions:

1. What is most likely to be wrong with it?

2. What can I do to try to recover the data?

Pictures of the drive included below

Answers :

1) It's died. Most probably internal problem (seen a lot on HM160Hx don't know why). Was it jarred / experienced shock ?

2) Nothing at your reach as the drive is probably not recognised at all (see if it clicks (even a faint clicking) at startup , if vibrates excessively in comparison to an identical drive, if starts then spin down, etc.) and pro gear is necessary for complete diagnose and eventually perform intervention.

Before you ask : replacing the PCB is a waste of money and time. Accept the loss as you said there's nothing important on it. Otherwise take it apart for fun and destroy it, at least you see how it is made.

Hi,
If you don't want to send it to someone that knows more on harddrives, then you won't get your info back..sorry!
BUT the most baffling thing is, when you first got those errors you did'nt took time to do a backup of your files

Regards
Bosse

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Can you confirm whether the make/model of your drive is shown in the BIOS setup screen of the PC?

If the drive make/model is not shown in the BIOS setup (i.e. the drive is not responding to the BIOS correctly for even an ATA Identify Device command), then as BlackST says, your ability for DIY is likely to be zero.

However if the drive make/model is shown in the BIOS setup, and the error message about not being able to find a hard drive which you mentioned, is really one about not being able to boot from a hard drive, then you might be able to something - search the forum for posts about "cloning", and you'll see some suggested programs. Although they won't be as capable as some of the professional equipment, if you have decided against pro help, then that would be something that you could persue, at your own risk (especially since the drive is clearly deteriorating).

Thanks for your answers!

Everything sound normal when I start it. It spins normally and there is no clicking sound...

In windows, after a few minutes, it shows up as two drives. One is about 100mb and CAN be accessed, although it is empty. The other is not accessible and it just hangs when I try to open it.

It is not shown in Bios when I start up...

The fact it is not shown at POST in BIOS then comes up after a while "that way" makes me think about two or three things, but it's not DIY- fixable in any case if my hypotesis is correct.

It is strange that a recent drive (2010 manufactured so I assume it has about 1 year or less) developed "by itself" such a problem, unless it is a case of always possible infant mortality - however Samsung drives are really well made.

If you were here I could make a test and eventually (loosing everything on it) fix it like brand new for a small small small fee (NO RECOVERY, if you want to have data recovered it has a VERY VERY VERY different price).

This specific difference in behaviour between BIOS & OS reporting is very rare, in my experience.

It seems to suggest a change in drive behaviour i.e. immediately after power-on, the drive is not behaving correctly (e.g. not yet ready etc.) and hence not reported by the BIOS - but the drive must then start to behave at least a little more normally (e.g. becoming ready), for Windows to report its existance later.

All I can say is that the fact Windows does report its existance at all, offers a glimmer of hope that some cloning of the drive might be possible, with care & coaxing - although I would not be cloning using Windows, out of personal preference.

Given that this isn't something you've done before, I'm not going to have the time to hand-hold you through that learning process from scratch - so either you'll have to reconsider paying someone to assist, or else wait for a forum member who has more time to offer to assist (if that happens).

So the good news is that it's not quite as dead as your initial description had suggested, given that it becomes visible to Windows but that is not saying that successful cloning will definitely be possible.

Make the clone of HD. Use HDClone, DMDE or linux DDrescue.
Then you can recover from the copy.

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Update:

I have tried various programs now, the only one that has been somewhat succesful is DMDE.

On my stationary with Vista 32bit I am not able to see the drive at all, however, my laptop and Win7 64bit finds the drive, but I can't open it.

With DMDE I can see all the files and I have tried to recover a few of them, everything looks OK, only problem is that it is running extremely slow (This makes sense after what I wrote in my first post). I can recover files about 30 sec per MB, that is around 8,5 hour per GB.... and I mainly need to recover big videofiles

So does anyone have an idea of what could be wrong?

And what should I do? Just recover it the slow way and hope it will work long enough?

Are you doing it by a USB connection? Like this it could take allot of time.

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But look at the actual figures from the OP - even USB 1.1 does not take 30s per MB so even if USB is being used, that is not the bottleneck in this case.

Of course we know what typical cause of such delays is, but that isn't something that the OP can fix - especially since he says he's trying to do file recovery instead of cloning the disk as he was advised

Thinking about this a little more, I'd consider trying CCTL during cloning to limit the retries and gather all the data which can be read quickly first of all.

Of course to send that command (via smartctl, hdat2 etc.) is likely to need the drive to be direct-connected via SATA and not via USB (depending on the bridge chip). So for a different reason, I agree that USB (if it is being used for the old drive) may be a problem here, pclab

Yes I was using USB connection to my laptop. And I would love to try to clone it instead, but as I wrote, DMDE is the only program so far that doesn't just hang when I try it. I did HDClone as someone mentioned above, but it just hangs when it starts to search for the drive.

I tried to connect it to my desktop PC (Vista 32-bit) also via USB, but it doesn't detect the drive at all. I could try a SATA connection on my desktop, but I remember the last time I tried that I destroyed my drive (I was told that desktop PCs use different voltage and that was the reason for the failure? hehe I have just avoided it since).

And I am not trying to recover all of my files, I was just surprised to actually see my files again so I just quickly grabbed my word and excel documents

You said you know what the cause typically is... So what might that be? Just out of curiosity?

And your last post... I don't know what all that means? Is it something I can do with HDClone and a SATA connection?

Oh and DMDE reported a CRC error for maybe 2% of the files. I don't know if that is important. Excel reported these files as damaged.

Thanks for your help!

You can plug it to your PC with no problem. Try and see if it goes faster.
The problem is the more you try, the more you can damage the drive.
As Vulcan said, you should image the drive....

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