Failed HDD: Can this drive be reclaimed??

gang I've gone OCD+ now... over the holidays I had some more time to put in on this project. That drive is 'failed' in such a way that its not only difficult to detect/read or run tools on, it actually crashed two different system. it left one of my Vista mules in such a condition that it went out of Activation... and that was merely by slaving it across USB. Disk Management would hang/crash, destabilize the system... twice it blue-screened on me. Crashed a Win xp system in similar fashion but no damage.
The several times I was able to run either chkdsk /r or chkdsk /f, it typically would run for 20 hours or so, hit about 9% to 17% complete, then flame out. so gave up on that approach.

went to a third system, my "go to" win7 Ultimate lab do-anything sys, hooked in by usb adapter. after trying different jumper settings [which, I thought would make no diff using usb adapter, but it apparently does make a diff]. .. sometimes windows could not detect it - game over. power off, change jumper, back up. - could detect, but could not online it... "device not ready".
Anyway, when I finally got it stable enough to Letter, I tried running Photorec and Recuva. For reasons I don't understand, photorec would go AWOL at the stage of drilling down on the volume - that is, merely identifying the volume, then hitting "Continue" it would just sit for hours without moving to the next screen, so I gave it up. Recuva could not open the volume - bailed immediately.
So I finally took the final, possibly fatal step of formatting [the drive would alternately, depending on the tool, show a FAT file system, NTFS, and/or RAW]. I tried twice unsuccessfully to 'quick format' ntfs. 3rd time was the charm - it succeeded. After that, I ran Recuva quick pass for one filetype and reclaimed 2 .pdf files that I could pull up and read. That was encouraging, so it is now in 'deep scan' mode, ran for almost 20 hours and is at 1% complete. So I'm going to stick with it as long as that complete %-age increments.

z

zapp22 said:

gang I've gone OCD+ now... over the holidays I had some more time to put in on this project. That drive is 'failed' in such a way that its not only difficult to detect/read or run tools on, it actually crashed two different system. it left one of my Vista mules in such a condition that it went out of Activation... and that was merely by slaving it across USB. Disk Management would hang/crash, destabilize the system... twice it blue-screened on me. Crashed a Win xp system in similar fashion but no damage.
The several times I was able to run either chkdsk /r or chkdsk /f, it typically would run for 20 hours or so, hit about 9% to 17% complete, then flame out. so gave up on that approach.

went to a third system, my "go to" win7 Ultimate lab do-anything sys, hooked in by usb adapter. after trying different jumper settings [which, I thought would make no diff using usb adapter, but it apparently does make a diff]. .. sometimes windows could not detect it - game over. power off, change jumper, back up. - could detect, but could not online it... "device not ready".
Anyway, when I finally got it stable enough to Letter, I tried running Photorec and Recuva. For reasons I don't understand, photorec would go AWOL at the stage of drilling down on the volume - that is, merely identifying the volume, then hitting "Continue" it would just sit for hours without moving to the next screen, so I gave it up. Recuva could not open the volume - bailed immediately.
So I finally took the final, possibly fatal step of formatting [the drive would alternately, depending on the tool, show a FAT file system, NTFS, and/or RAW]. I tried twice unsuccessfully to 'quick format' ntfs. 3rd time was the charm - it succeeded. After that, I ran Recuva quick pass for one filetype and reclaimed 2 .pdf files that I could pull up and read. That was encouraging, so it is now in 'deep scan' mode, ran for almost 20 hours and is at 1% complete. So I'm going to stick with it as long as that complete %-age increments.

z

Eek, that is a mess. If recuva does not work, try Free Format Recovery Software | Recover files after format free | iCare Format Recovery Free as it has saved me a few times and a few others on these forums, as well.

excellent. thanks for the tip. I'll do it.

got my fingers crossed on that iCare package, mate.
the Recuva lacks a feature that would have helped a lot... dunno about iCare, but its the ability to save the data necessary to restart the scan at the point of stoppage. The drive is so wobbly that it will just stop communicating at random, so the os loses it as if not there, which hangs the package and it does not know how to recover, so you're stuck beginning from the edge every time. iCare is making more progress faster, if the feedback data means anything. its about 3 hours deep into the first run [took me awhile to get the drive responding again] and shows a reasonble 16 hours left. shows a large 'found' file count. dunno if the drive will hold up that long but I can hope.

thanks for the tip

zapp22 said:

got my fingers crossed on that iCare package, mate.
the Recuva lacks a feature that would have helped a lot... dunno about iCare, but its the ability to save the data necessary to restart the scan at the point of stoppage. The drive is so wobbly that it will just stop communicating at random, so the os loses it as if not there, which hangs the package and it does not know how to recover, so you're stuck beginning from the edge every time. iCare is making more progress faster, if the feedback data means anything. its about 3 hours deep into the first run [took me awhile to get the drive responding again] and shows a reasonble 16 hours left. shows a large 'found' file count. dunno if the drive will hold up that long but I can hope.

thanks for the tip

Yeah, I prefer iCare myself. There are other programs out there that you can purchase that may do better. Let me know if you are interested in those after you let iCare do its thing.

Happily reporting the first real significant success. Writh, that iCare package did its thing - running about 40 hours or so it found a lot of usable files so I was able to get the freeware limit of 1GB of data off the drive and safely archived away. The beneficial circumstance here, I think, is that for whatever reason, the drive has stayed up and communicable now for a solid week, which previously was impossible. So with each passing hour I'm holding my breath, but the heat buildup from running continuously seems to help, oddly enough. So now I'm back running photorec, and so far it has not barfed, but is indicating several days worth of nonstop work to get the rest of the images and docs. iCare's speed is much better, and the interface is Explorer-like, letting me pick off files in fine detail, unlike Photorec which takes entire categories.

So here's hoping for additional hdwe stability sufficient to finish this job.

zapp22 said:

Happily reporting the first real significant success. Writh, that iCare package did its thing - running about 40 hours or so it found a lot of usable files so I was able to get the freeware limit of 1GB of data off the drive and safely archived away. The beneficial circumstance here, I think, is that for whatever reason, the drive has stayed up and communicable now for a solid week, which previously was impossible. So with each passing hour I'm holding my breath, but the heat buildup from running continuously seems to help, oddly enough. So now I'm back running photorec, and so far it has not barfed, but is indicating several days worth of nonstop work to get the rest of the images and docs. iCare's speed is much better, and the interface is Explorer-like, letting me pick off files in fine detail, unlike Photorec which takes entire categories.

So here's hoping for additional hdwe stability sufficient to finish this job.

Congrats, and best wishes! :) Keep us updated, too.

got several hundred more files off in good shape via photorec. its a real crawler, and will take another week to go through every sector but my guess is I already have the bulk of the useful files.

a question for you guys: tangental to this reclamation I have planned to use the owner's 1TB "My Book" WD external drive to store these recovered bits but win7 doesn't like it for some reason. I pulled it in successfully on an older Vista mule I have, but when I attach it to my 7's it gets drivers loaded, then I can pull it up under Disk Management and its id'd ok, but I do not have the ability to assign a Drive Letter, and thus cannot access it directly. Tried rebooting with the drive attached, same results.
Am I doing something wrong?

When I go to disattach safely using the USB manager, it ID's the drive correctly also.
... annoying

Do the following:
1. Click Start Menu
2. Click All Programs
3. Click accessories
4. Right click Command Prompt and Run as administrator
5. Type diskpart
6. Type list disk (once diskpart finishes loading, of course)
7. Type select disk # (where # is the disk number corresponding to your WD "My Book")
8. Type list volume


What is listed under FS for the volume associated with the "My Book" ?

Edit: Do not close diskpart, we're not done with it yet. :)