Hello,
I'm having an issue with a 2,5" Seagate hard drive (ST9160827AS). The drive seemed to be working fine until yesterday : I wasn't able to boot. I tried to hook it up to another PC but when plugged in, windows (8) hangs during loading (of course, I selected an healthy drive to boot from).

The solution I found so far was to connect the power cable once windows was started. From there, I did a rescan in the device manager and the drive appeared. If I try to open the Disk management console it hangs at the detection phase. I also tried many recovery programs (like Active recovery, getdataback, Minitool partition, EaseUS) but they all freeze at the detection phase ! Because of that I wasn't able to check the SMART with HDtune or crystal diskinfo (first thing I tried).

So a that point I thought it was kind of over (at my level at least) but to my suprise both partitions were shown in "My PC". The first one (system) is not accessible but the second one is. I already had a backup of most of the data and I was able to retrieve the rest. I used "Copy/paste" directly (maybe not the best choice ?) and it looks like nothing got corrupted. But the transfer was awfully slow, averaging 200KB/s. By the way those 1TB or 4TB drives scare me now, it would have taken half a year (not even exaggerating !). I bet the drive would have died before the end !!

So at this point I think I got most of the important data secured but I would like to be able to browse the first partition to check if can save some others files. So what's the best way for me to do that ?

If you need additional information don't hesitate.

Others questions :
1 - So I did a kind of hot-plug in, is it bad for the drive ?
2 - Is it a bit safer to store data on a partition different from the system partition or is it just a pure coincidence here ?
3 - how can something like that happens overnight without any shock whatsoever ? (firmware corruption ?)
4 - I thought at first that if the drive froze disk management console, there would be no way I could see it in explorer ?!

Thanks a lot !!!

If the "SYSTEM" partition is around 200MB, then it doesn't have any of your files. Windows just uses it.

You are right about the large drives. taking more and more time for DR.

if you get the disk going somewhat, you could use DMDE to create an image of the whole disk, then you can peruse it late (and lots quicker) with your chosen DR software.

In fact this is the recommended way instead of what you did... but you did get your files, so that's a good end result.

I made some progress since my original post :

1/ I managed to get some SMART data using MHDD. The drive is recognized and the capacity looks ok.
Read error rate : 0
Reallocated sector count : 9
See error rate : 133 144 953
power on time : 3300h
Hardware ECC recovered : 51622216
Current pending sector : 191
Ultra ATA CRC Error rate : 0
Write error rate : 0


2/ I just finished a surface scan with MHDD. Around 10% of the disk I got approx. 800 AMNF and TONF. Around 20% I got 222 UNC, IDNF, BBK. Can these 2 ranges of errors have the same origin ? From around 30% the disk is "clean" and speed normal until the end.

The strange thing is that when I was copying my files the speed was constantly low, here the speed is normal (55mb/s at start) except before an error or at some random times (but very rare).

Current pending sector count is now at 1067 (from 9), reallocated sector count still at 9.


3/ I tried UFS explorer (under Windows) but like others it freezes when trying to detect the HDD. I also tried Testdisk (under DOS this time) and it loops when trying to detect the HDD, but it says "device reported invalid sector 0". I didn't think corruption could prevent a drive from being detected at the "device level" ?!


4/ Wow DMDE (under Windows) is detecting the drive fine ! Unfortunately analyzing the drive is taking hours and I didn't get much results so far (no traces of the 10GB Windows folder for instance !). The funny thing is that MHDD was able to find more files in 2s than DMDE in 3 hours. I don't know how is it possible !! By the way I'm pretty sure using those read intensive program is not the best way to preserve a dying HDD :p

From now I will let DMDE run this night and I think I'll quit after that. I would still be pleased if someone has some answers to my question. Thanks a lot !

Hello Haque and thanks for your answers ! No sorry by System I meant the C partition. The strange thing is that even though my C looks completely trashed, the system partition you're talking about looked to be in 'good shape'.

I wanted to do an image just after retrieving my files but since all the apps were freezing I gave up on that. I just retried with DMDE but after 2hours it only had done 2MB (I tried reverse copy too but it froze)... others scan (both in MHDD and DMDE) were quicker. But there are so many scans in DMDE, one for detecting partition (2 hours), then when opening a partition (5min). Then I tried the NTFS search on first partition (80GB, 3 hours), and right now I'm reconstructing the C system file from the MFT tables (very slow, 8% after 2hours). But I'm not sure I'll get anything from it since my ntfsscanlog has 290 MFT entries and is only 115KB.