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The emergency I need help with



 
 
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  #1  
Old May 9th 17, 02:21 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
philo
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,309
Default 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



  #2  
Old May 9th 17, 08:21 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Paul[_28_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,467
Default 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
  #3  
Old May 9th 17, 09:24 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Kenny
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 39
Default The emergency I need help with

"philo" wrote in message news
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

  #4  
Old May 9th 17, 11:35 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
philo
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,309
Default 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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