Hard Drive Crash (HDD) Faulty File System

[Wolf#10]

Hi All

I've experinced the ever devesating hard drive crash failure and unfortunately not backed up the drive at all. I have had a local IT person go through it and he was unable to recover the data / Files . He mentioned that there is an issue with the file system, could be a chip on the board somewhere that could be faulty.

Seagate Barracuda 750gb
Size 3,5inch
drive is very old / +/- 12 yers old

The problems i experince is:

• that when plugging the drive into PC , PC / Wndows 10 takes long to search.
• Sometimes After a while it picks up the drive and then im able to see the properties forthe drive. It then shows that the data is there.
• When expanding the drive location on the side bar, it shows the folders.
• also apparant in command prompt using the command directory instructions. Again its not alaways a successful run to view the directory.
• Drive does not give any apparant physical sound, like somthing touching the discs

When IT profesional was going through it

• Data recovery software could pick up that there was data and file names.
• Attempted data recovery process usinh his software was insitialized for 1 week but the data recovery was not able to transfer. Was stuck at zero percent

I really could use some assistance please with recovering the data on this drive if not piossibly repair it. Subsequent to this i did purchase online cloud based storage to backup data to. If the recovery is possible I would need to supply a storage drive to backup to. I have saved screenshots of some of the apparant issues.

Please Help

Cheers

 

[Switch]

You would want to clone your drive to a new drive. For a diy option do the following with an empty [larger sized] disk to copy to:

Use dd to Clone a Disk

The dd command in Linux is a powerful utility used to copy and convert a file. As in Linux, everything is considered as a file; even your hard disk drives. Hence, dd can also be used for cloning disks and partitions. The dd utility comes installed in almost all Linux distributions. How to use dd...

linuxhint.com

Be careful you do not mess up which is the source drive and which is the destination drive.

If/when the drive is making a noise you should preferably not plug in the drive anymore, and if you prefer a professional to do data recovery, use one of the following:

Cape town: Data Recovery Cape Town | Data Recovery Services | Southbit

JHB/PTA, in centurion: Tecleo Data Recovery and Digital Forensics Lab | Advanced Digital Forensics, Data Recovery and OSINT

Note your 750gb drive may be taken apart, it won't be usable after the data recovery guys have gone through it.

 

[Wolf#10]

You would want to clone your drive to a new drive. For a diy option do the following with an empty [larger sized] disk to copy to:

Use dd to Clone a Disk

The dd command in Linux is a powerful utility used to copy and convert a file. As in Linux, everything is considered as a file; even your hard disk drives. Hence, dd can also be used for cloning disks and partitions. The dd utility comes installed in almost all Linux distributions. How to use dd...

linuxhint.com

Be careful you do not mess up which is the source drive and which is the destination drive.

If/when the drive is making a noise you should preferably not plug in the drive anymore, and if you prefer a professional to do data recovery, use one of the following:

Cape town: Data Recovery Cape Town | Data Recovery Services | Southbit

JHB/PTA, in centurion: Tecleo Data Recovery and Digital Forensics Lab | Advanced Digital Forensics, Data Recovery and OSINT

Note your 750gb drive may be taken apart, it won't be usable after the data recovery guys have gone through it.

Thank you so very much for the info and reference. I have contacted Tecleo and going to send them the drive. I hoping ill get my data recovered successfully.

Thanks & Kind Regards

 

[lukekay]

Hey man, I just saw your thread and figured I'd give my 2c for future and to maybe help anyone else who finds themselves in this position.

If you are comfortable with linux there are quite a few opensource tools that work wonders for data recovery, one of them is GNU ddrescue (sometimes dd_rescue) which will allow you to dump the block level data to either an image file or another HDD which is the same size or larger - this includes retry mechanisms when IO errors are detected helping preserve as much data as possible, can even be paired with a reverse copy which starts at the end of the disk rather. You can then attempt to repair the filesystem on the disk image or cloned disk and see if data recovery is possible locally, this leaves the original data/disk intact if you still need to send it in to Tecleo etc.
- HowTo: How to Clone Hard Disks with ddrescue - Datarecovery.com

The above leverages a linux tool called 'dd' which is comically referred to as 'disk destroyer' if used incorrectly, so be sure to triple check your 'IN' device and 'OUT' device otherwise you will do what I have done in the past and written blank data from the "clean" disk onto the damaged one...


testdisk is another opensource tool that has saved me a few times when it comes to file recovery on deleted/corrupt partitions/filesystems. It's not the most user friendly but, there are plenty guides out there on how to get varied results depending on what went wrong. If memory serves it may discard folder structure when recovering - best case IMHO if the alternative is complete data loss.
- HowTo: How to Install and Use TestDisk Data Recovery Tool in Linux

Anyways, feel free to PM me if you have any questions.

** Edit **
I just noticed that Switch had already provided 'dd' as an option with the same caveat regarding source/destination disks. The warning about mechanical failures is also very very valid, forgot to mention it... Can end up doing irreparable damage attempting recovery.