Hi everyone.

I have ST31000528AS FW CC46 that was bought about 2,5 year ago. Half a year ago it was repaired by
Seagate (bad blocks) and since then it worked ok. Recently i checked it in hdsentinel and he reported
about 100 rellocated sectors (in SMART). So i run tests in SeaTools. SMART check was ok, so was Short
drive self check and Short generic. But during Long generic test seatools closed himself while test was
still running. After reset, and even after poweroff disk is still running (i can hear a sound like
during coping files, no clicking). There is one NTFS partition on that drive. Windows 7 is not booting
up when this disk is connected to the Computer (windows is installed on other disk).

Summary of things that i tried :
- disk is recognized by bios in IDE mode (but not in AHCI mode),
- hdsentinel (dos version) recognize disk and reports about 800 rellocated sectors in SMART,
- in mhdd i can start surface test but almost every sectors is red (read time >500ms),
- disk responsed to spin down, spin up and init commands (in mhdd) but none of them helps, its starting doing the same thing right after init or spin up,
- in linux (Parted Magic) partition from this disk cannot be mounted,
- in dos (volcov commander) NTFS partiotion can be mounted and directories are accesible, but nothing
can be copied (program hangs after few hundred bytes),
- seatools for dos can see the disk but every test is ended by error: drive is not responsing to commands
(error code A2E3D748)

Can you help me to recover data? I think (or hope) disk will be accesible if i can stop that test or
anything else that is going on with it.

You begin by saying that HD Sentinel (Windows version?) reports 100 reallocated sectors.

Next you say that the DOS version of HD Sentinel reports 800 reallocated sectors.

Now SeaTools is reporting a test code of A2E3D748. AIUI, this code is unique to your drive and is an encrypted number based on your drive's serial number and the number of the failing test.

About SeaTools Test Codes:
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?l ... 1000001a...

My understanding is that the second last digit identifies the failing test, as follows:

xxxxxx4x - SMART Fail
xxxxxx5x - Long Test, long LBA test
xxxxxx6x - Short Test, short LBA test
xxxxxxAx - Self-Service SeaTools Test Code
xxxxxxCx - Short Generic
xxxxxxDx - Long Generic
xxxxxxEx - Short DST
xxxxxxFx - Long DST

Therefore, your drive has now failed SMART. This usually means that it has exceeded the maximum allowable number of reallocations before hitting the SMART threshold. IIRC, this number is around 2500 for your model.

In short, your drive is failing very rapidly. Your only chance for DIY data recovery is a tool such as ddrescue. However, I suspect that you will not be successful.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Seatools is failing in all tests, not only SMART. Error description suggests that drive is not responding to commands. As for ddrescue problem is that i would need 1TB free space to recover whole disc, which i don't have I was hoping for selective recovery of about 30% of most crucial data. MHDD reads first sectors of the disk so i think there is still hope. If only i could find program that can read NTFS partition from DOS with high tolerance for errors ( i already tried ntfspro, NTFS Dos, NTFS4Dos), or somehow stop disk from reallocating sectors or whatever is it that is doing (heads are working all the time like during coping of files).

The first few sectors are on head/surface #0. That says nothing about the other heads/surfaces.

AIUI, reallocations only occur during writes, so as long as you don't write on your bad drive, you should be OK.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

So if it's not reallocation's then what's the drive doing if i'm not trying to do anything and disk sounds like it's copying massive amounts of data ? Latest news from the battlefield : i managed to copy one 186B file from the drive! Next i tried 768KB file and it was failure. I'm using Volcov commander + ntfs4Dos. Anything better i can use ?

I don't know about DOS, but here are two Windows/Linux utilities:

Unstoppable Copier – Tool for Damaged or Bad File Copy:
http://www.roadkil.net/unstopcp.html

Bad Block Copy for Windows:
http://alter.org.ua/soft/win/bb_recover/

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

If you really want your data back stop now. You need to quit working on a failing drive before it is way too late for you to do anything about this one.

Clone the HDD now if you still can. Then work from the clone if you get lucky and can finish the clone after all you have done to this HDD. The more you mess with this the more problems you will have in the end. Then you will be forced to take it to a DR company who has the proper tools to clone a drive such as your. You only chance now is to try and use ddrescue and clone this HDD.

_________________
Iorana Haraharaini

Professional approch should be to clone disk in reverse order using some tool like hdduplicator which can skip bad sectors & to work on image only

I can't clone an entire HDD because i don't have enough space and also the data is not so important to buy new disk. I managed to mount that ntfs partition in linux using SystemRescueCd. Now i can copy my files using cp command (any file managers are hanging) at moderate speed. Thanks for all replays.