Solved Seagate 2TB Hard Drive not responding, stops programs from working

[Anshad Edavana]

Please follow the below steps.

1. Boot in to Windows and make sure to only plug the failing disk as a slave drive. Then download DMDE from http://dmde.com/download/dmde-free-2.8.2.546-win32-gui.zip

This is the freeware version. It won't let us recover the data but will virtually reconstruct the original file system by assembling MFT fragments and we will be able to know whether the files are recoverable.

2. After accepting the licence, a disk selection window will appear. On the left pane, make sure Physical Devices is selected and then on the right pane choose your slave disk (model name will be showed ). Then press OK.

3. Now DMDE will scan for the presence of boot sectors or backup boot sectors and will present a partition info box like the one in the below example.

4. Press the NTFS search button. On the next window, choose "Search".

This will take some time to complete. You will see progress in percentage at the bottom.


5. When the scan completes (reaches 100% ), press "Save" button and save the log file on a local folder. This will eliminate the need for searching a second time.

6. After saving the log, choose the first found file system and press "Open Volume" button. You will see folder structure like in the below picture.

7 Now double click on "All found + Reconstruction" and a confirmation window will appear. Press OK button and the reconstructed file system will be presented.




Can you see your lost files ?.

 

[Questionerer]

For step 1, do i have to do anything special to plug in as slave drive? Not sure what a slave drive is exactly.

 

[Anshad Edavana]

For step 1, do i have to do anything special to plug in as slave drive? Not sure what a slave drive is exactly.

A slave disk means a secondary disk connected to the system. You don't have to do anything special. Plug the disk to USB as usually but don't try to open the partition. Doing so may cause explorer to hang. Just scan the disk with DMDE as i instructed. DMDE is capable of scanning a failing HDD and virtually reconstructing the file system unless CHKDSK messed the file system. Yes, CHKDSK has the bad habit of converting corrupted files in to chunks which makes the recovery difficult. Another tool is "GetDataBack for NTFS" but it is much more costlier than DMDE.

 

[Questionerer]

Thank you everyone for your helpful suggestions!

I have managed to recover many of the files I thought were lost from the hard drive.

Here is what worked for me:

For some reason I plugged the failing hard drive into my TV (and the TV did detect it and could see files inside). I also was able to navigate into the found.xxx directories which contained dirxxxx.chk files which themselves were like renamed folders for the files I needed.

After this, I plugged the hard drive into Windows and Windows did detect the drive and I ran error-checking. Then the drive was accessible. I did not see the "found.xxx" folders on Windows though. But when I opened the disk in Linux Mint, they were indeed there. So from Linux I could copy the contents from dirxxx.chk folders to a safe location (although it took some time as many folders took a long time to load into).

I then tried the DMDE. After finished search, it showed the found.xxx and dirxxx.chk folders much like it did in Linux except navigating through DMDE was much faster than through Linux. Also, some files which I missed in my navigation on Linux were there and I could recover them much faster!

So for some reason, plugging my hard drive into a TV allowed it to be detectable on Windows is the conclusion I've come to. But I am not sure why that is.

Also, another weird thing that happened was Photorec recovered files which were never on the hard drive it was recovering from in the first place...

 

[Anshad Edavana]

Hi

It is good to know that you managed to recover at least some of the files. CHKDSK has the bad habit of converting corrupted files to chunk files without user's confirmation.

Also, another weird thing that happened was Photorec recovered files which were never on the hard drive it was recovering from in the first place...

May be they are residues of files which are previously deleted even before the corruption happened.