Had a Seagate Barracuda 7200 3TB fail suddenly Sunday without any previous problems when I was moving over some photos from a weekend trip. Most of the stuff on the drive is backed up or in the cloud or on another disk BUT not all of it (I know, I know, I know!) Windows couldn't repair it.

Found HDD Raw Copy and read about some folks with similar problems and decided to try to clone it. Got another Seagate 3TB yesterday. Husband formatted it as NFTS drive and we started HDD Raw around 5:00 last night. First bad sector was LBA 0, unrecoverable error. The remainder of the drive had about a total of probably 30 bad sector errors. It just completed about 20 minutes ago.

We reviewed the log and set about to see what was on the clone. That's when Disk Management said, "You must initialize the disk before logical disk manager can access it." The disk is showing as "Disk 1, unknown," when before the cloning process it was showing as J NFTS (the one we were cloning from is E)

I can't tell if there's anything we can do to make this disk viable. I assume (you know what they say about assume) that the LBA 0 error might be at least part of the problem, but I'm not sure. I also don't know if at this point we need to try another cloning software or just get it to somebody who can handle this better. It doesn't appear to be a mechanical failure. Drive spins and sounds normal to us anyway.

Any suggestions on how to make this work with what we've just created (a new doorstop?) deeply appreciated. Other suggestions we can try here also appreciated, but we don't want to screw up and make matters worse.

tia,
Laurel

I would examine the clone with a disc editor, eg DMDE (freeware).

http://dmde.com/

Can you show us DMDE's partitions window?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

thanks so much!

Oh, no. My husband was trying to get OUT of the disk management to go to that website and, well, you got it. It's now initializing. (he's not the one who usually hits the wrong buttons, too.)

I am probably going to have to get this original drive to a professional now for sure. I would love to try to image or clone it one last time, but not sure if I should (especially if it comes out like this time) since I'm not sure why HDD Raw Copy ended up with an unallocated drive.

Yes, it's very apparent this is seriously situation dependent and a positive progress bar doesn't mean success. I have learned a lot already and find the field of data recovery quite fascinating. Does anyone have a reputable recommendation in the Nashville/Middle Tennessee area? if not, I'll need to get it shipped off.

I plan to get all new drives and start fresh. I had problems with backup errors and got lazy with life. Of course the drive that failed never threw any errors on maintenance scans and was the newest of my three data drives. Murphy lives in my computer.

Laurel

"Unallocated" means that Windows cannot see the partition information in sector 0, which is understandable since you say that LBA 0 was unreadable. When this happens, Windows offers to "initialise" your drive.

Recovery after initialisation is relatively easy. Often it involves just one or two mouse clicks in DMDE. Recovery after formatting is more difficult but still DIY-able.

Please show us DMDE's partitions window. If you can see your data partition, double-click it. Do you see your files and folders?

That said, it would be very unusual, but not impossible, for only the first sector to be bad. Most often when this happens the whole drive is inaccessible.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Okay, I have no problems goofing around with the clone aka doorstop, but am taking the advice here not to touch the original drive any further. (I have a ticket in with the only local I could find that isn't actually just a drop-off.)

I'll plug the failed clone drive back in and run that and see what it says. Hubs is usually the calm one and rarely screws up. I told him to chill for a few and see what somebody said here, but, well, yeah, that didn't go so well.

No, there were 30 unrecoverable errors for bad sectors. Unfortunately, hubs exited out before I could print the screen and it appears there's no history that I can find in hdd raw. There were a few around the 30% mark. Then a few overnight. There was a group of about 4 in the 195,XXX,XXX,XXX and 196,XXX,XXX,XXX range. The last error threw at 10:29 am and the process showed complete at about 6:00 p.m. The drive is only about half full. Not sure if those photos just hit a bad spot or what.

I have since Googled and it's the worst drive known to mankind. 7200.14 Seagate. I will plug it in and run that program and see what it says and post it here.

ISTM that you have done all that is required in terms of cloning. There is nothing that a professional DR shop would be able to do for you that you couldn't easily do yourself.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

I think this is what you asked about. I am not sure if he did anything further with it last night after I went to bed. I just told him I didn't want to mess with the original E drive anymore but we both figured this was not viable but that was probably a bad, uneducated call (I am detecting a trend).

Physical Drive 0 [3.00 TB] GPT 3.00 TB [ T ] LBA: 0 - 5 860 533 167
GUID Unknown 134 MB [ E ] LBA: 34 - 262 177
unallocated 3.00 TB [ ] LBA: 262 178 - 5 860 533 134
$Noname 01 found NTFS 3.00 TB [ B C F ] LBA: 264 192 - 5 860 532 223

I just got an email from the local folks to bring it in for $99 for an evaluation. I have no problem with that -- I just hope they are good and reliable. If I knew I had a good copy of it, I'd play around and try to learn from this but I am not going to risk it.

Once I get this off to them, I have to set about getting other Seagate drive(s) out of my computer. I am not sure what to trust anymore but I also want to set up a 6TB external and get my backups back on track. I got sloppy and I'm paying for it.

Yeah, I found the backblaze on that and threw up a little in my mouth. 2 years almost to the day and BOOM! I am so sad that Mr. Clicky Fingers couldn't hold off a second (but hey, he's way down on impatience and random clicking between the two of us). I did that with R Studio's demo version and it shows stuff in that clone but since it's been initialized AND reformatted, I'm not sure what I'm looking at.

Just talked to the locals and not feeling very warm and fuzzy. They can't tell me how long it will take to tell me if they can do it. They can't tell me even a ballpark cost or a maximum. If they can't get it off with software, they'll send it off to be cracked open because they don't have a clean room. I'm pretty sure it's NOT hardware, but I am not really comfortable turning it over and two weeks from now being told I need to give them $3K to get back my stuff.

If you d-click the $Noname partition, you should see your data. If so, then a repair should be only a couple of clicks away.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Unless I just don't know what I'm looking at, I don't think so. It shows "all found + reconstruction," "meta data" "root" and "system volume information" and "recycle bin." I'll never know for sure if the files were there before the husband click fest and the reformatting or if it was just all zeros but I can't seem to get anything of substance to come up with d click. I had submitted another post about where/what to do next but it said it required a moderator so I must have put something in there that was not appropriate for forums. I mentioned that local data recovery couldn't give a top end price or even a ballpark and that may be it. I gotta find somebody to get this to, though, I think and get this salvaged if possible. I'd love to take another run at it, but just don't know enough and don't want to send it into the ditch permanently, assuming it's still viable.

oh, hold the phone. Doing a detailed scan with R Studio demo. It's only 11 minutes into the scan and says it's found 58k of specific file documents so far. I guess maybe I will want to try to use R Studio to somehow get them back from my click-clone doorstop. Gee, wouldn't it be dandy if I knew how to do that?!?

If you expand the root folder (click the +), you should see your files and folders. If the file tree is empty, then this would suggest that your husband has formatted the drive.


Do you mean that R-Studio found 58000 files, or do you mean that it found 58K bytes of data?

If the former, then ISTM that all you would need to have done to recover your data would have been to r-click the $Noname partition and select Insert the Partition (Undelete). That's it. Write Changes, reboot and done.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

We know he formatted the drive. He didn't MEAN to, but, well, yeah. He did. He was playing around to see if you could initialize without formatting but hit a wrong key or misread the screen or both.

It's still scanning in R Studio. It's up to having found 1,442,715 specific file documents and 27,974 Fat Entries and 3357 NTFS Directory Entries. I watched their YouTube and it sure does look pretty straight-forward recover them.

I'll try to restore a file under their demo limit of 256K. If it works, I'll pay the $80 and get what I can off the clone and onto a new external or something. I probably don't have enough space on my other two internal drives if it finds enough of my data (good problem to have) and i'll keep that external for a new network backup. It's got another 3 hours left on the scan, though, so too soon for partying. If that doesn't work, I'll contact a few of the professionals whose names I see here and see about shipping off the original drive.

The original drive can probably be recovered with a couple of clicks. Let us know when R-Studio has recovered your data and we can then repair sector 0 on the original.

Best of luck.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

As much as I can get? Seriously, I am a hoarder, but I am a hoarder for various reasons. A LOT of it is business-related that is beyond the required 5 years in my industry, but if I can help a client with something from 2008, well, I'm a hero. I can retrieve the same stuff in different formats or go get it from clients, but I have all of it in one nice tidy spot (well, I had it. Key operative word.) I also am a photographer and my camera takes BIG RAW photos and I take a lot of them. Now, stupid thing, my lightroom catalog AND my photos are (were?) on the same drive. I'll be changing that.

I would be delighted to have to ask for a honey-do from hubs to stop at BB and get me a 6 TB external (anything but that brand that shall never be named again). I can use it for redundancy. (oh, and my Dropbox folder is on this drive. That's a boatload of the files, even though they're all safely in the cloud) I know I should cull some files, especially photos, but I'm always too busy trying to squeeze too much life in a day to do it!

So far there's 25 unrecognized blocks in the beginning -- could be from his activities post formatting. There's a total of 14 more at this point and we're 32% in. I know the original drive had some slow times from 30% to 35% and then it was pretty much clear sailing on the clone. Not that that necessarily means anything, of course.

Understood. We'll see if we get anything from this. if I can get 90% of it, I'll attempt another clone process on my own. If I get zero or only a little, I'll send it off to one of the folks whose sites I've seen in signature lines here. Not feeling enough comfort with the local folks because of the ambiguity on time and cost and prefer some of the straight-forward approaches I saw on folks' sites here.

no more unrecognized sectors so far so time will tell...

Well, it is done. It showed anything that was unused space before as "unrecognized" and the rest of the unrecognized sectors pretty much matched what came off the clone.

Recognized files is pretty minuscule, but by golly what it got, it got right. Unrecognized files is a lot. I mean a LOT. And they're MY files, by golly. But they're sort of a mishmash file salad, and they're of course not in folders or anything so it will take me a really long time to make sense of them. And of course many of them R-studio had no idea what they were and made them all sorts of interesting things by adding extensions for files I have never seen and certainly never had on my drive (many of them not able to be opened). BUT I think that the data was there and the clone probably would have been a lot more viable before the clickery. So now I have to figure out how to proceed from here. I can purchase the program and retrieve all there is to retrieve, but not sure I can ever assemble it back into what I had or even close to it.

time to make some decisions, I think.

If you know the file types you want, limit R-studio to scanning for just those types. It will reduce the amount of work trying to make sense of the results. Those files of unrecognizable types could just be spurious sequences of bytes that happen to match the header format of those file types, and can safely ignored.

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Sabo Computer Repairs & Data Recovery

Yes, I can try that, I suppose. I'm just not sure with this current clone that I'll ever be able to wade through it all to get it back into any semblance of order. And it may be totally our fault because of not knowing what to do when the cloned drive came up as unrecognized and unallocated.

Important Question I have: When a drive is cloned by an expert, do you typically get back something that looks like what you had before with just missing folders and/or files? Or does it all come back as just random files that need sorted? Forgive my ignorance if this is a super stupid question.