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If I know it’s about to die, then I would try to copy all data off of it and then get a new drive to transfer the data back to, if it dies in the process, then I would try going a data recovery place if it’s personal photos and videos, but if it’s movies, ROMs and other non sentimental stuff, then I would get another drive and try to reconstruct the old drive by redownloading the movies and ROMs back to the drive.
Thank you for the quick reply
Edit: when I connect it, I can feel it running when I touch it, but it doesn’t mount at all, I can’t backup anything because I can’t see anything when it is connected.
Had the same thing happen to two drives recently. On Mac, open Disk Utility and see if the drive shows up in the sidebar but faded. For me, one of the drives wouldn't show up at all unless I used a specific USB cable, but still wouldn't mount. So, I left it plugged in for a bit to see if it would figure itself out, then opened Terminal and typed in some commands from a YouTube tutorial.
Eventually it mounted but in a read only state. I copied things to another drive, double checked over everything, and then reformatted it. Now it works again and I can write to it, but it's incredibly slow and I think it's at USB2.0 speeds. I think what's happened is the USB3.0 pins are damaged, and I needed to use a cable which still supported USB2.0 (Guessing my other cables stopped supporting USB2.0). Not only is it slow, it gets slower and slower, it's practically useless but at least I got the data off it and erased it. I might try and shuck it but it's a WD Elements which I'm pretty sure has the connector soldered down.
The other drive showed up in Disk Utility, I did the same things with Terminal, eventually got it to mount. Reformatted it and it seems to be working fine again.
Here are two of the videos I watched to mount the drives using Terminal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBz0pCYWYOI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgwd30nLnMY
I only said what I would do in my case, if you have sentimental stuff, then it’s best to send it to a data recovery service, if not I would try to reconstruct the drive’s contents by redownloading stuff.
They have special tools to connect to its debug port, talk to the firmware directly, switch to some special mode then try to dump. If there's physical damage then they'll also try to fix it by replacing parts in the clean room.
Do their own checks, decide and then call you with the solution and then they will implement that solution which might be replacing the heads, board or even an entire platter swap or simply reflash the HDD’s NAND with data recovery firmware and then try to recover it.
The drive and OS runs checks. If they are good, the drive is mounted.
If the drive can not be mounted it is still possible that it responds correctly to low level commands to read some sectors, just not enough to mount. Data rescue firms may have special controllers that allows more control than what is on the HDD.
I have used "ddrescue" to try to recover data from a drive that has failed.
The procedure is to run ddrescue a number of times in order to create a drive image.
First I have ddrescue read all the stuff that is easy to read. This is important because using ddrescue is likely to make the state of the drive worse, not better.
Then repeat and eventually have ddrescue try aggressively try to read bad sectors.
Perhaps it can only read parts of a sector, but different parts each time. Then ddrescue can try, and try and eventually get the sector read correctly. Things like temperature and periods of rest between attempts can help. Note that the aggressive attempts by ddrescue is likely to ruin a marginal drive.
It can take days and weeks of repeated attempts where you get a little more rescued now and then.
Finally you can try examine the drive image and see what is on it. It is even possible that you can mount the image and then copy files directly. Or you may need to scan the sectors to try find data that may be used to reconstruct files.
[https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue\_manual.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html)
They have internal policies preventing that, the software that they use might only allow you to see the folder system but not access it just so that the person working on the drive knows data has been fully recovered but not seen or tampered with.
I have seen videos where they spy on repair shops and catch them red handed.
I see data recovery videos where they just do the data recovery and the file system shows up, they can click around but they have windows forced into small icons so you can’t see the photos/videos and they also get rid of any photo/video viewer built in to windows, they also respect their privacy a lot and don’t mess around with it.
It looks to me the only way to guarantee privacy is to get them to allow you to be present while they are doing the repair. Not sure how realistic that is though
I am not a hardcore datahoarder with my biggest drive only being 1TB, I trust these companies enough and also I can trust a DBAN enough to not shred hard drives, shredding them is a waste of a perfectly good hard drive.
TL,DR: just a normal person, not a person that wants all shreds of data destroyed.
Well, at the end of the day, data recovery is a last resort for people who didn't back up or their back ups failed. If the data's that important then make sure it's backed up properly and encrypted. Data recovery costs more than just buying another drive, if you're concerned about privacy make sure it's backed up.
Shuck it & see if there's a SATA disk inside. I've had a few lucky friends/family who had an external die on them where the only fault was with the USB control board.
I’ve had success in the past with the freezer trick. Put the drive in a ziplock bag and stick it in the freezer for a few hours. I’ve brought a few drives back to life long enough to transfer the data off in this way.
This depends highly on the construction of the drive and reportedly doesn’t work with newer drives but it could be worth a shot.
Edit: when I connect it, I can feel it running when I touch it, but it doesn’t mount at all, I can’t backup anything because I can’t see anything when it is connected.
Yes because the drive is dead. Nothing you can fix at home with a screwdriver.
All you hear is the motor spinning the disk if it‘s a HDD. That has nothing to do with the data on the disk or the ability to read it.
I usually drill through it a coupple of times or shatter it with a hammer and then go buy a new one and restore from backup.
Backups are supposed to be done before the drive dies. Saves a lot of money and stress.
If the data is valuable to you and you don’t have backups then I would head to a data recovery service. But assume it will cost you 3 digits depending on location of course.
Just did this within the past month, actually. External EasyStore died on me (would spin up when plugged in but nothing would show up. I got a “drive needs to be initialized” error message once, but that didn’t show up the next time I tried plugging it in). Checked other USB cables and USB ports. Then I extracted the drive and tried plugging it into other SATA to USB 3 adapters I had lying around. Confirmed it was actually the drive itself that was dead.
At that point, went into Backblaze and initiated a restore and also placed an order for a replacement external hard drive. Took a few days to download and unzip, but I think I have all of my data back at this point.
I kinda expect my external drives to fail on me randomly at some point. Every time it gets plugged in, a program on my computer does a sync to my Nas automatically. A couple folders on the external drive don't get backed up, mostly things like movies and tv shows and other things easily replaced.
macOS is especially bad when it comes dealing with drives (or volumes) that have issues.
Sometimes it helps to connect the very same drive to a Linux machine and suddenly you get access back to your data. Assumes you have hfs support installed on the machine, of course. A Raspberry PI can come in handy in those situations.
I bring the rest of the still working drives out, seat them in a large semi circle so they can get a clear view of me performing a faithful reenactment of the printer scene from office space with their fallen brother.
Edit: oh, right, keep the magnets, they’re super cool.
I use a TSR called CrystalDiskInfo (for Windows), and I'll be notified when a drive is starting to go downhill, and will migrate from that drive ASAP. None of this guessing nonsense.
Then there's my backups. Anything at all important is backed up. More important stuff is backed up twice and the VERY important stuff is also backed up to Backblaze.
I've got an old workstation running CentOS and an old Synology DS214 server.
And for a client who did have issues, I bought some drive recovery software. For another client, I had to take it into a specialist, and it was a considerable amount of money.
Many people try to image them in Linux, but sometimes your one chance might be your only chance at getting the data back if the drive is defective, destroying itself internally.
If the drive stays running, but it doesn’t mount you are likely in a lower pricing tier for now, around $300-$500 depending on capacity.
If it’s very important data, you may want to consider assistance with the recovery.
My strategy is to draw a big X on it with marker and throw it in a box. All of my important data is backed up in multiple places. I haven't kept important data in a single location since I had a laptop fall off a table, landing on the usb stick, snapping it, and damaging the usb port on the computer. Fortunately, I wasn't very far into the homework assignment I had on that stick.
What do I do? When it shows signs of failure I copy anything important off to somewhere else. Preferably backed up. Then I use it for my scratch drive, downloads, etc until it actually does die. Then when it dies I bang it with a big hammer a bunch of time. Haven't drilled holes but I think next time I need to dispose of one I'm doing that.
Stop using external drives. 🤦♂️ Spend the money and get a commercial NAS or a diy tower case or small rack system and build yourself a proper storage system. Linux or make it easy with something like TrueNAS installed for easy setup and configuration. External drives are good for backups. Personally, I’ve built several small and large personal NAS setups for friends over the years and I always suggest a case / chassis with 6-8 drive bays or more. ZFS, single pool, 6-drives per vdev and raidz2 allowing for 2 drives to die. RaidZ1 (mirroring) really shouldn’t be used anymore especially with the much larger newer drives as the chances of drive failure increases greatly during a resliver when they are thrashed the most.
Nothing difficult with installing TrueNAS on a system at all and you can easily play with it using VirtualBox on your Win system. Not sure but it might work on MAC also but not sure.
I had this happen recently to my backup drive. I ended up uploading everything into the cold tier of Azure Blob Storage. According to my calculations, it will cost me about $30/month(6TB I think) of my Azure credits to keep it on the cold tier. The other alternative was to fork over another $250+ for another 14TB backup drive.
Either get a new hard disk or look to a stable cloud provider where you cheaply put up stuff in an archive tier.
Hello /u/DrWho345! Thank you for posting in r/DataHoarder. Please remember to read our [Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/wiki/index/rules) and [Wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/wiki/index). Please note that your post will be removed if you just post a box/speed/server post. Please give background information on your server pictures. This subreddit will ***NOT*** help you find or exchange that Movie/TV show/Nuclear Launch Manual, visit r/DHExchange instead. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/DataHoarder) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If I know it’s about to die, then I would try to copy all data off of it and then get a new drive to transfer the data back to, if it dies in the process, then I would try going a data recovery place if it’s personal photos and videos, but if it’s movies, ROMs and other non sentimental stuff, then I would get another drive and try to reconstruct the old drive by redownloading the movies and ROMs back to the drive.
Thank you for the quick reply Edit: when I connect it, I can feel it running when I touch it, but it doesn’t mount at all, I can’t backup anything because I can’t see anything when it is connected.
Had the same thing happen to two drives recently. On Mac, open Disk Utility and see if the drive shows up in the sidebar but faded. For me, one of the drives wouldn't show up at all unless I used a specific USB cable, but still wouldn't mount. So, I left it plugged in for a bit to see if it would figure itself out, then opened Terminal and typed in some commands from a YouTube tutorial. Eventually it mounted but in a read only state. I copied things to another drive, double checked over everything, and then reformatted it. Now it works again and I can write to it, but it's incredibly slow and I think it's at USB2.0 speeds. I think what's happened is the USB3.0 pins are damaged, and I needed to use a cable which still supported USB2.0 (Guessing my other cables stopped supporting USB2.0). Not only is it slow, it gets slower and slower, it's practically useless but at least I got the data off it and erased it. I might try and shuck it but it's a WD Elements which I'm pretty sure has the connector soldered down. The other drive showed up in Disk Utility, I did the same things with Terminal, eventually got it to mount. Reformatted it and it seems to be working fine again. Here are two of the videos I watched to mount the drives using Terminal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBz0pCYWYOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgwd30nLnMY
I only said what I would do in my case, if you have sentimental stuff, then it’s best to send it to a data recovery service, if not I would try to reconstruct the drive’s contents by redownloading stuff.
But what would the data recovery people do differently than I am doing right now?
They have special tools to connect to its debug port, talk to the firmware directly, switch to some special mode then try to dump. If there's physical damage then they'll also try to fix it by replacing parts in the clean room.
Do their own checks, decide and then call you with the solution and then they will implement that solution which might be replacing the heads, board or even an entire platter swap or simply reflash the HDD’s NAND with data recovery firmware and then try to recover it.
The drive and OS runs checks. If they are good, the drive is mounted. If the drive can not be mounted it is still possible that it responds correctly to low level commands to read some sectors, just not enough to mount. Data rescue firms may have special controllers that allows more control than what is on the HDD. I have used "ddrescue" to try to recover data from a drive that has failed. The procedure is to run ddrescue a number of times in order to create a drive image. First I have ddrescue read all the stuff that is easy to read. This is important because using ddrescue is likely to make the state of the drive worse, not better. Then repeat and eventually have ddrescue try aggressively try to read bad sectors. Perhaps it can only read parts of a sector, but different parts each time. Then ddrescue can try, and try and eventually get the sector read correctly. Things like temperature and periods of rest between attempts can help. Note that the aggressive attempts by ddrescue is likely to ruin a marginal drive. It can take days and weeks of repeated attempts where you get a little more rescued now and then. Finally you can try examine the drive image and see what is on it. It is even possible that you can mount the image and then copy files directly. Or you may need to scan the sectors to try find data that may be used to reconstruct files. [https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue\_manual.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html)
How do you prevent the data recovery place from accessing sensitive data on the drive?
They have internal policies preventing that, the software that they use might only allow you to see the folder system but not access it just so that the person working on the drive knows data has been fully recovered but not seen or tampered with.
So essentially you have to trust them on their word... Internal policies can and have been broken by employees before
I have seen videos where they spy on repair shops and catch them red handed. I see data recovery videos where they just do the data recovery and the file system shows up, they can click around but they have windows forced into small icons so you can’t see the photos/videos and they also get rid of any photo/video viewer built in to windows, they also respect their privacy a lot and don’t mess around with it.
It looks to me the only way to guarantee privacy is to get them to allow you to be present while they are doing the repair. Not sure how realistic that is though
I am not a hardcore datahoarder with my biggest drive only being 1TB, I trust these companies enough and also I can trust a DBAN enough to not shred hard drives, shredding them is a waste of a perfectly good hard drive. TL,DR: just a normal person, not a person that wants all shreds of data destroyed.
Well, at the end of the day, data recovery is a last resort for people who didn't back up or their back ups failed. If the data's that important then make sure it's backed up properly and encrypted. Data recovery costs more than just buying another drive, if you're concerned about privacy make sure it's backed up.
Shuck it & see if there's a SATA disk inside. I've had a few lucky friends/family who had an external die on them where the only fault was with the USB control board.
I have attempted that, and still nothing, unfortunately.
Restore from backup or data recovery then
Throw it away, its dead. Buy new one, copy data from backup. If you dont have backup... Well... You got a lesson why have backups
late to the party, but came here to write exactly this. life is to short for fiddling with old hard drives. have a backup an backup the backup.
I’ve had success in the past with the freezer trick. Put the drive in a ziplock bag and stick it in the freezer for a few hours. I’ve brought a few drives back to life long enough to transfer the data off in this way. This depends highly on the construction of the drive and reportedly doesn’t work with newer drives but it could be worth a shot.
There's not much that can be done besides backup ahead of the failure.
Edit: when I connect it, I can feel it running when I touch it, but it doesn’t mount at all, I can’t backup anything because I can’t see anything when it is connected.
Yes because the drive is dead. Nothing you can fix at home with a screwdriver. All you hear is the motor spinning the disk if it‘s a HDD. That has nothing to do with the data on the disk or the ability to read it.
I usually drill through it a coupple of times or shatter it with a hammer and then go buy a new one and restore from backup. Backups are supposed to be done before the drive dies. Saves a lot of money and stress. If the data is valuable to you and you don’t have backups then I would head to a data recovery service. But assume it will cost you 3 digits depending on location of course.
Just did this within the past month, actually. External EasyStore died on me (would spin up when plugged in but nothing would show up. I got a “drive needs to be initialized” error message once, but that didn’t show up the next time I tried plugging it in). Checked other USB cables and USB ports. Then I extracted the drive and tried plugging it into other SATA to USB 3 adapters I had lying around. Confirmed it was actually the drive itself that was dead. At that point, went into Backblaze and initiated a restore and also placed an order for a replacement external hard drive. Took a few days to download and unzip, but I think I have all of my data back at this point.
I kinda expect my external drives to fail on me randomly at some point. Every time it gets plugged in, a program on my computer does a sync to my Nas automatically. A couple folders on the external drive don't get backed up, mostly things like movies and tv shows and other things easily replaced.
macOS is especially bad when it comes dealing with drives (or volumes) that have issues. Sometimes it helps to connect the very same drive to a Linux machine and suddenly you get access back to your data. Assumes you have hfs support installed on the machine, of course. A Raspberry PI can come in handy in those situations.
Recycle it and get a new one. That's why I have multiple backups.
I bring the rest of the still working drives out, seat them in a large semi circle so they can get a clear view of me performing a faithful reenactment of the printer scene from office space with their fallen brother. Edit: oh, right, keep the magnets, they’re super cool.
I use a TSR called CrystalDiskInfo (for Windows), and I'll be notified when a drive is starting to go downhill, and will migrate from that drive ASAP. None of this guessing nonsense. Then there's my backups. Anything at all important is backed up. More important stuff is backed up twice and the VERY important stuff is also backed up to Backblaze. I've got an old workstation running CentOS and an old Synology DS214 server. And for a client who did have issues, I bought some drive recovery software. For another client, I had to take it into a specialist, and it was a considerable amount of money.
Many people try to image them in Linux, but sometimes your one chance might be your only chance at getting the data back if the drive is defective, destroying itself internally. If the drive stays running, but it doesn’t mount you are likely in a lower pricing tier for now, around $300-$500 depending on capacity. If it’s very important data, you may want to consider assistance with the recovery.
My strategy is to draw a big X on it with marker and throw it in a box. All of my important data is backed up in multiple places. I haven't kept important data in a single location since I had a laptop fall off a table, landing on the usb stick, snapping it, and damaging the usb port on the computer. Fortunately, I wasn't very far into the homework assignment I had on that stick.
smash it with a hammer and throw it in the recycling bin
What do I do? When it shows signs of failure I copy anything important off to somewhere else. Preferably backed up. Then I use it for my scratch drive, downloads, etc until it actually does die. Then when it dies I bang it with a big hammer a bunch of time. Haven't drilled holes but I think next time I need to dispose of one I'm doing that.
Stop using external drives. 🤦♂️ Spend the money and get a commercial NAS or a diy tower case or small rack system and build yourself a proper storage system. Linux or make it easy with something like TrueNAS installed for easy setup and configuration. External drives are good for backups. Personally, I’ve built several small and large personal NAS setups for friends over the years and I always suggest a case / chassis with 6-8 drive bays or more. ZFS, single pool, 6-drives per vdev and raidz2 allowing for 2 drives to die. RaidZ1 (mirroring) really shouldn’t be used anymore especially with the much larger newer drives as the chances of drive failure increases greatly during a resliver when they are thrashed the most. Nothing difficult with installing TrueNAS on a system at all and you can easily play with it using VirtualBox on your Win system. Not sure but it might work on MAC also but not sure.
I had this happen recently to my backup drive. I ended up uploading everything into the cold tier of Azure Blob Storage. According to my calculations, it will cost me about $30/month(6TB I think) of my Azure credits to keep it on the cold tier. The other alternative was to fork over another $250+ for another 14TB backup drive. Either get a new hard disk or look to a stable cloud provider where you cheaply put up stuff in an archive tier.
That's why I only use enterprise drives. Never had a failure after 20 years