The emergency I need help with
I was given a 5Tb external drive that cause the machine to lock up.
The woman who brought it to me is running Win10 Normally I remove the drives and install them internally to see if the drive is good or if the enclosure simply has bad electronics. Though I confirmed the enclosure is bad by trying it with a known good drive...it seems the 5TB drive is corrupted. It does not come up in Explorer and disk management "wants" to initialize it which will desultory all data. From a Google search I see there are utilities to repair the MBR but since it's 5TB I assume it's GPT. I advised her to take it to a data recovery outfit but am wondering if there is anything safe I can try? I am pretty sure I'm going to wash my hands of the matter |
The emergency I need help with
philo wrote:
I was given a 5Tb external drive that cause the machine to lock up. The woman who brought it to me is running Win10 Normally I remove the drives and install them internally to see if the drive is good or if the enclosure simply has bad electronics. Though I confirmed the enclosure is bad by trying it with a known good drive...it seems the 5TB drive is corrupted. It does not come up in Explorer and disk management "wants" to initialize it which will desultory all data. From a Google search I see there are utilities to repair the MBR but since it's 5TB I assume it's GPT. I advised her to take it to a data recovery outfit but am wondering if there is anything safe I can try? I am pretty sure I'm going to wash my hands of the matter Photorec or Recuva for file scavenging. TestDisk for MBR rebuild. TestDisk is not all that clever a program, so you mainly want to see what it finds, rather than accepting and writing back the resultant MBR. Very few times, does it reach the right conclusions. TestDisk, when it finds a partition, can present the directories and offer to copy content off. Which is another way you might recovery something. I would be using the two disk method for recovery. I would be buying two 6TB drives or having such as spares. You're right to send her off to Data Recovery - a 5TB drive will take you all week to work on, and just from a labor rate perspective, no matter what happens, you lose. Doing a 500GB drive, is still going to be annoying at best. But a 5TB drive - I'd just send them away, because it'll feel like a "lifetime project". However, I'd still be tempted to run TestDisk, even if the initial scan might take 5000000/150/3600 = 9 hours. So if you had the drive in your possession that long, before she picks it up, you might be able to get a list of partitions, then use the listdir capability to list the files. That would show her whether there is actual data to be recovered. If the disk is in bad need of CHKDSK, then files copied off via TestDisk may actually be corrupt and useless. The assumption at this level, is that it's just an MBR/GPT table problem. And I've not tried it on a GPT disk yet, so I don't know how stupid it is. When it scans, it should really only need to scan on 1MB boundaries. Like, if it's a GPT disk, all the partitions would probably be on 1MB boundaries. Which in theory should reduce the scan time. It just "feels" like it's reading every sector. I suppose some day I should run ProcMon and see what the scanning span is (distance between sampled LBAs). http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec http://www.piriform.com/recuva/builds The following program, helped a poster in the WinXP group recover data from a corrupt NTFS partition. The author of the program sold the source, and it reappeared as a commercial $39.95 product. This program could not possibly know about GPT, so it would be a waste of time to try it on the 5TB drive. But get a copy of this anyway, and put it in your data recovery folder, as it's a freebie. http://web.archive.org/web/200701010...rescue19d.html ******* I really do recommend a couple large disks, if you're going to be making a serious effort on a project like this. Seagate makes some nice 200MB/sec 6TB drives. You want PMR, not SMR drives, as it appears the disk companies think themselves heroic for having half their product line covered by crappy (25MB/sec write) SMR drives. PMR drives run at the full rated speed. (In 2014, this was hot stuff. ST6000NM0024 $250 each) https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...9SIA2W01VZ5175 The replacement model, hard to say if it's as good, as there aren't enough reviews. ST6000NM0115 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...1Z4-002P-00139 I'd have bought the '24 if I'd had the budget for it. When you buy those, you have to be careful to buy the SATA III one with 512e or 512n. As the 4Kn version would be like a brick in your computer room. There is absolutely no interworking capability at all, between 512 drives and 4Kn. The only time a 4Kn drive comes in handy, is if you're working on data recovery from 4Kn drives and have the software to handle them. So don't get fooled into buying any 4Kn drives... (Of the models offered, the ST6000NM0115 is SATA 512e, and there are no 6TB 512n drives in this generation.) http://www.seagate.com/www-content/d...04US-en_CA.pdf Paul |
The emergency I need help with
"philo" wrote in message ...
I was given a 5Tb external drive that cause the machine to lock up. The woman who brought it to me is running Win10 Normally I remove the drives and install them internally to see if the drive is good or if the enclosure simply has bad electronics. Though I confirmed the enclosure is bad by trying it with a known good drive...it seems the 5TB drive is corrupted. It does not come up in Explorer and disk management "wants" to initialize it which will desultory all data. From a Google search I see there are utilities to repair the MBR but since it's 5TB I assume it's GPT. I advised her to take it to a data recovery outfit but am wondering if there is anything safe I can try? I am pretty sure I'm going to wash my hands of the matter Have used this successfully in the past for unreadable disks. http://www.dposoft.net/hdd.html Kenny |
Conclusion
On 05/08/2017 08:21 PM, philo wrote:
I was given a 5Tb external drive that cause the machine to lock up. The woman who brought it to me is running Win10 I am going to have her take the drive to a lab. Though I have used data recovery software in the past with success, this drive seems too defective to use it. A Windows machine soon locks up and when I try to access the drive from Linux gparted does not even see it. Her data is way too important for me to fool with. BTW: The drive failed the day after I gave her a lecture about backing up! The last person to work on her computer returned it to her with no drive letter assigned to the internal drive where she did her backups :( |
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