Hello,

I'm starting to have some major issues with one of my data drives. During file transfers on the drive, this internal drive will sporadically disconnect and reconnect seemingly when it is under 'heavy' file read/write jobs. It will be sporadic burst of normal read/write speeds but it always returns back to it's unstable nature which I've deem it impossible to recover by traditional means of copying through windows explorer. The drive itself now sounds under powered and it feels/sounds like it's not spinning at the correct RPM but I don't know. It has recently been acting very unstable to the point where I can barely explore the content within windows as it will lock explorer up so I now need to resort to try recovering the data.

The 1TB drive is almost filled and trying to copy all that data under normal circumstances with the extreme unstable nature, is pretty impossible. It is under warranty, I just need the data off the drive before I can replace. Running WD tool says it has bad sectors.

Could anyone tell me any options they see here? Is it a hardware defect? Can I just replace the PCB? What type of severity in terms of data recovery are here? Should I just seek data recovery estimates?

I would appreciate any help, Thank you.

Sounds like media issues (bad/weak sectors) to me, so should be fairly straightforward (I.e. reasonably priced) for a pro with a decent hardware imager to handle.

If you don't really care for your data and are prepared to take the risks, then you could try the DIY approach and clone it yourself with some sort of NON-WINDOWS sector cloner, such as Media Tools Pro or dd_rescue. Then once you have the clone, you should be able to extract the data (you may need some s/w like GetDataBack or RStudio to rebuild the file structure).

But be warned that you could damage your drive even more doing this and render it IRRECOVERABLE, or at least a whole lot more $$$$$

My advice is to take to a nearby pro and get a diagnosis and/or quote. In the UK, a job like this (assuming only bad sectors) should cost no more than about $500.

Hope this helps?

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I appreciate the follow up. If you were to utilize one of the non-windows sector cloners, how might that damage the drive further? Are you just saying, putting it under those reads/writes may damage it further or the tools directly?

Any sort of reading a damage drive could damage the drive further. Whilst these software-only solutions are ok for relative healthy drives, they cannot cope with failing drives as well as professional hardware solutions.

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Failing drives' sectors must be read only once: When they are recovered.-

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