Hey guys,

I'm looking for advice before I do anything further with this drive.

I'm trying to recover irreplaceable family photos and wedding videos from my late uncle's computer.

Drive

Seagate ST3000DM001-1ER166
Firmware CC25
3 TB

Windows reports:

"You need to format the disk before you can use it."

I have not formatted it.

SMART (CrystalDiskInfo)

Health: Caution

Notable attributes:

Reallocated Sectors (05): 2080
Current Pending Sectors (C5): 14168
Uncorrectable Sectors (C6): 14168

Temperature is normal (35°C).

DMDE

Using DMDE 4.4.4.

Full scan completed (about two days).
CRC read errors while reading portions of the MFT.
Earlier scans found an approximately 8.38 GB NTFS volume with about 59,000 files.
Current partition display shows several unusual entries, including partitions much larger than the physical drive.

Following advice from another recovery forum, I checked the device parameters.

BPS was already set to 4096, so there was nothing to change.

Current DMDE partition screenshot attached.

Question

At this point, what would you recommend as the next step?

Should I:

stop all diagnostics until I can clone the drive,
attempt imaging with HDDSuperClone,
investigate further in DMDE,
or is there something else worth checking first?

Unfortunately I do not currently have another 3 TB drive available for imaging.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Yes, you should first back up your drive with an image, because if it dies during your current operations, you'll be left with nothing.

Looking at the SMART information, you might suspect head/surface degradation, and further scanning of the damaged drive will only worsen the problem.

It would also be best to disable all unnecessary components in module 93. You would need to connect a terminal and check if it's unlocked.

Only after imaging the drive can you begin recovering data from the image/clone.

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Data recovery Poland (RAID, HDD, SSD) - https://hex-serwis.pl

Yes, please find or buy a new 3TB hard drive and clone the faulty drive first. This model (ST3000DM001) is known to be an extremely unreliable drive (nominee or title of the most unreliable hard drive in the world - check Wikipedia!) - it can fail at any time and data recovery will become extremely expensive.

Also, after cloning, I can recommend using R-Studio; in cases where the file system is severely damaged, this utility does a better job than DMDE. I had a lot of experience with DMDE when entire folders with files were not found and those files that were found were corrupted. I also advise you to try the R.Saver utility - it is free and allows you to restore entire folders, but it also quite often misses a lot of data when the file system is corrupted. Get ready for the fact that restoring photo and video archives will be long and manual work. But again, all this is only after a complete disk cloning.

Attached are photos for reference.

Another thing I want to warn you about: don't use SATA-USB cables or external hard drive enclosures. I encountered a situation where a portable Western Digital hard drive caused the converter chip to malfunction due to a large number of unreadable sectors. The computer thought it was reading the data, but in reality, the drive froze and didn't output any data at all. As a result, the copied data was garbage. This may be the reason why DMDE can't find a valid file system in your case.

For cloning, find a computer where you can connect the hard drive directly to the SATA port. I also recommend using OpenSuperClone; the original HDDSuperClone hasn't been updated in a while.

The Seagate ST3000DM001 is a 3TB 3.5-inch internal desktop hard drive. It features a 7200 RPM spindle speed, 64MB cache, and SATA 6Gb/s interface. Originally released as a high-capacity storage option for multimedia files and programs, it is widely known for experiencing significantly high, premature failure rates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001

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Orico DS500C3-US-BK 5-disk 3.5" SATA, iTGZ 4x M.2 2280 Thunderbolt enclosure NVMe/SATA, etc. etc.

Thank you for your advice. I understand your recommendation to stop further scanning and image the drive first. Unfortunately I don't yet have a spare 3 TB destination drive, but I'm going to obtain one before doing anything else.

Regarding module 93 and the terminal connection, I don't have professional recovery hardware, so I won't attempt any firmware modifications myself.

Thank you. I appreciate the recommendation.

I will obtain another 3 TB (or larger) drive before proceeding.

I have one question: once I have the destination drive, would you recommend cloning directly to another physical drive, or creating an image file with OpenSuperClone?

Also, are the default OpenSuperClone settings generally appropriate for a drive with SMART values like mine, or would you recommend changing any options?

Thank you for the advice. If I connect the drive directly to SATA and use OpenSuperClone, do you recommend cloning to another physical drive or creating an image file? Also, are there any OpenSuperClone settings you'd recommend given the SMART values?"

I suggest maybe a low cost 4TB disk which are way more reliable

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Orico DS500C3-US-BK 5-disk 3.5" SATA, iTGZ 4x M.2 2280 Thunderbolt enclosure NVMe/SATA, etc. etc.

If you're using a 3TB hard drive, there's no other option but direct sector-by-sector copying to the drive, as the image file won't fit by several hundred megabytes or even several gigabytes - the file system will take up that space. If you're using a larger drive, you can use either option. I tried both copying to a file and copying directly to the hard drive, and I had no problems. DMDE and R-Studio can work with image files, but R.Saver can't - keep that in mind. Since I preferred not to purchase licenses for these programs, but to use the free R.Saver, manually copy the missing files using the free DMDE version, and restore the original file and folder names using R-Studio's demo mode, I chose direct copying to the hard drive. I would also recommend saving the project file to a separate flash drive, not the one from which the OpenSuperClone will boot.

No additional configuration is required, but OpenSuperClone has the option to hide the source hard drive from the system upon boot. This prevents the operating system from attempting to search for a file system on the drive or prompting you to format it. It's not the hard drive that's hidden, but the physical SATA port. Before copying, you'll need to find out what numbers are assigned to each port.

The application settings include Direct IDE and AHCI modes; these should be used in conjunction with hiding the hard drive.

You can skip this option and simply start copying by selecting the source and destination drives. Since the program copies data while avoiding hard-to-read sections during the initial step, the drive will copy much faster than scanning with DMDE. DMDE also has a disk cloning option. I tried copying a severely damaged drive with it, which took a week and hundreds of reconnections. HDDSuperClone copied the same drive in 20 hours without reconnecting it during the initial steps.

Another important point: don't buy the cheapest possible drive. Any 2.5-inch hard drive is guaranteed to be unsuitable for copying, as are many cheap 3.5-inch drives. What you shouldn't buy: a drive with the SMR recording method. Look for a drive with the CMR recording method, otherwise you'll be in for an unpleasant surprise when copying: a write speed of 30 megabytes or less.

Thank you very much for the detailed explanation. That answers my questions.

I will plan on obtaining another drive first and cloning directly drive-to-drive with OpenSuperClone over a native SATA connection. I also appreciate the advice about saving the project file separately and the explanation of the SATA port hiding feature.

And thinking ahead a bit, if the hard drive takes a very long time to copy, say, the first 10-20 gigabytes, and then the program starts throwing errors like "hard drive not responding", "hard drive busy", "hard drive returned zero capacity", and so on, you might be tempted to simply reconnect it to the computer and force it to continue copying. When all the data has already been copied and you just want to experiment with it, this is acceptable, but when there's valuable data on the drive, this is absolutely not a good idea.

Lukas mentioned something scary here called "patching sysfile 093". Translated into plain English, this means that you'll have to invest an additional 50 cents and buy a USB-TTL adapter and three wires. This "professional equipment" can be purchased at any hobby electronics store. On the hard drive, next to the SATA data port, there's something with four pins - that's the diagnostic connector.

Next, you'll need to install the adapter driver (Windows will likely do this automatically) and download the Putty utility. Then, launch and configure this utility. This means "select 'Serial' from the three options, enter COM1 and 38400 in the corresponding text boxes, and click OK". Then, in the black window that opens, press a hotkey combination and copy-paste several text lines that will be provided to you if this happens.

This simple procedure is necessary to prevent the drive from attempting to reread unreadable sectors, remapping them, freezing while attempting to do so, or performing other self-diagnostics, which would be equivalent to self-destruction for a damaged drive, but instead simply continuing to read data.

Considering that the drive survived the DMDE scan, although it's unclear what was scanned, it's likely that this won't be necessary, and the cloning process will result in copying almost the entire drive except for tens of megabytes - most of the uncopied data will be in the area where the file system data itself was stored.