Does anyone know how to recover media off a failed hard drive? I bought a 2TB WD Green drive in May and it has stop being recognized by my rig. Drive was recognized by the BIOS but not Windows at first but now does not show whe plugged in with different cables to make sure it was not the cable and I tried it in 2 other rigs and none of them can see it. You can feel the drive spin up when you power up and it does not feel rough or make any weird sounds. Drive is going to be RMA'd with WD but would like to try and save the media first. (next time the system will be set up with RAID to save from this hassel, i learned my lesson) The cheapest I have been quoted is $800 if it is possible even to retrieve the data. thanks, Scotty
The price sounds about right. That kind of thing is expensive. I'm assuming you've contacted knoll ontrack and datatech labs? I hate to be that guy, but next time, pick up a subscription to CrashPlan. Let me know if you're going to a meet someday. I'll bring a free year of it for you. http://www.code42.com/crashplan/
Seal it in a ziplock freezer bag around an eSata cable, throw it in the freezer, then once it's stabilized start it up and get the data off ASAP. Mostly serious, this can work - do a web search.
You're in a pickle. Sounds like you might get away with replacing the PCB on the drive to get it to work again, but this would void your warranty (assuming WD catches it). You can always try putting the bad PCB back on after you get your data off, but you'd still have to buy a good PCB from somewhere. The freezer trick won't likely work. That's just for clicking drives. $800 is wicked cheap for data recovery, stuff's changed since I last looked.
Well I do have another one of these in the computer, but.... I dont think I want to pull apart a working drive to try and recover the media. I'd rather just spend a couple evenings reloading all the media back on the computer from the DVD's than risking damaging the good drive. The quote was actually 800-1700 and they thought it would probably end up being the higher side based on my description of the issues. But thanks for the help! Scotty
Give Seagate Data Recovery Services a call and see what they think: http://www.seagate.com/services-software/data-recovery-services/
So decided the worst I could do is F-up the old drive and be out $85, so I pulled the PCB of the bad drive to see how easy it was and to see how it connected to the HDD itself. Super easy! So I shut down the rig, pulled to other WD 2tb Green drive I bought the same time as the failed drive. Swapped the PCB, on the start up it showed as Errored for it port, but still showed up in the BOIS when I looked at the drives plugged in. Then started windows and it did not automatically show and was not showing at all in Computer Management. So I'm thinking of giving up and just RMAing the drive to get a new working one and then reloading all the media back on the drive from the DVD's... oh well... its only 44 tv shows with 1000+ episodes total... weeeeeeeee So where is the best place to learn about RAID settings?
whats funny to me about that is, these are the first none Seagate drives I ever bought. The shortest a Seagate drive lasted me was 6.25 years (the only one to ever fail me), The oldest one working is 12 years old. People talked great things about the WD's so I tried and lost 1 of the 3 I am running... but atleast its under warranty and I can get a free replacement. All in all, I'll keep with the WD's and will just chalk this up to just getting one of the rotten eggs from the batch.
That's funny to me, as I used to service Ultrasound equipment, and our supplier of choice for drives was Seagate, and those things had around a 70% failure rate right out of the box, with an average lifespan of 3-6 months. It got to the point that when I'd travel to a site to replace one, I'd order 4 of them just to make certain I got one that would take an operating system long enough for me to leave the site. I probably replaced over a thousand of them in my time at the company. I have only had one WD drive die on me. And that is after it had been transplanted into 6 different PCs over its lifespan. I didn't read your woes too closely, have you tried placing it into another PC and attempt to access it? I have had luck with that in the past, especially when the BIOS on one machine can see it. It saved 2 Seagates I have had in the past on some Dell Laptops I had. I ended up hooking them up to my desktop as a spare drive and got the info off them before they died. -Jason
Yea I tried the drive on different rigs and with multiple connections on both to make sure it was not a cable or bad port on the MB. Also tried it with the other working 2tb Green drives (bought at the same time) PCB and it would only show in BIOS but was showing an Error during start up check and not showing at all in Windows.
If it were me, I would run a backup location in RAID 1, with enough space on one of the mirrors for all the data you care about. If 4.5TB is what you want saved, you'll want to run a RAID 1 array that provides 4.5TB+ storage space mirrored. (so 9TB total physical disk, 4.5 mirrored) The odds of BOTH drives taking a dump at the same time is pretty low, just be prepared to start tossing over 4TB of drives at it should one half the mirror array take a crap.
http://www.microcenter.com/product/...nch_SATA_III_60Gb-s_NAS_Hard_Drive_-_WD40EFRX These are great as they have lowered power consumption, but did so while simultaneously removing the drive parking that kills long term storage drives. It's about as close to enterprise storage reliablility that you are going to get in a retail drive.
Have you tried booting ubuntu off a CD and seeing you can access the drive now that it's showing up in the bios again
I will try this tonight. Thanks everyone that has helped with this trouble shooting, much appreciated.
Seagate Recovery Services has DIY software available, it's made for disks with logical errors like this. It's free to try out to see if it can 'see' all the files, then I think it's $99 to buy the software license to actually recover them: http://www.seagate.com/services-software/data-recovery-services/consumers/file-recovery-software/ BTW I do work for Seagate, but I have no vested interest (or experience with) Recovery Services, their software, etc - totally different group than I'm in.
I had the same kind of experience like you. I got a WD that died on me after 5 months, but my seagate is running 7 years strong. But I guess it all depends on luck.
