Broken Hard Drive

[Cheeseumpuffs]

Hey folks, so a while back my external seagate hard drive stopped working. There was nothing too valuable on it so instead of spending tons of money on the Geek Squad I ended up buying a new one.

The other day I read about how some people freeze their hard drives in order to fix it and, since I still have the old one around, thought it was worth a shot. Nothing changed though.

Seeing as I have the old hard drive out and stuff, I figured I'd get another opinion, because you folks seem much smarter than me in general.

This is what the old hard drive looks like in My Computer:

This is what it should look like:

When I plug the old one in, it says I need to "scan and fix" so when I tell it to run that I get this error message:

Back when it broke, one of the friends I got to look at it said it seems like a physical problem with the hard drive. So, basically, if anyone has any insight, I'd love to know exactly what the problem is and if there's a way to fix it without spending a lot of money.

Thanks for reading

 

[crippli]

I am not particular knowledgeable about this. I have at least 5 old disks I hope to salvage at some point.

Did you do the regular tests. If the HD starts opp properly, and spin as it should. Basically does it make any new sounds? Is it recognized in the device manager tree?

 

[Cheeseumpuffs]

While it's plugged in it sounds fine and is spinning normally, however when I initially plugged it in and it began spinning it made a little sound very briefly.

The device manger recognizes it and says under device status that it's working properly.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

Did you run cmd, chkdsk? Or some other generik disk check only?
The socket/plug could be damaged, while the interior would be fine.

 

[EyeSeeCold]

Before you experiment with it, you can attempt to recover data with Recuva, make sure to enable deep scan. Don't format the drive of course.

A few questions:

1. What were you doing immediately before?
2. Did you try disconnecting/reconnecting? A different port?
3. This external drive requires requires a power source, correct? Did you check for any power issues?

 

[Cheeseumpuffs]

Yeah, when it first happened I ran chkdsk and it got stuck repeating this one message. I've been looking for it and trying to remember exactly what it said.

It had a 0 and I think a ~ towards the end of the line

sorry for being less than helpful

 

[Cheeseumpuffs]

A few questions:

1. What were you doing immediately before?
2. Did you try disconnecting/reconnecting? A different port?
3. This external drive requires requires a power source, correct? Did you check for any power issues?

1. I had just plugged it in to my desktop after getting back from thanksgiving break. It had been working fine with my laptop literally earlier that day. [EDIT: Evidence that it may be physical; my bag with all my stuff was jostled on the ride down and it may have damaged the drive somehow, but I don't want to just assume.]
2. Yes and yes. Different computers, too.
3. Yes and I found no issues.

 

[crippli]

Could be broken clusters. I have no idea if this is the best option,or if it can make matters worse. You can try booting in safe mode, although I'm not sure it matters when it is an external disk. Then run chkdsk /f Maybe it will then get through without hanging. You can try other handles. Maybe /b first. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHKDSK

Did you search the error message?

 

[EyeSeeCold]

It doesn't seem digitally corrupt, usually it would be listed as a RAW file format.

Is the enclosure sealed together, or can you safely take it apart? I would try plugging it directly to the internal SATA port.

 

[The Gopher]

Well I was given a laptop hard-drive that was dropped down the stairs to recover that looked similar to what you have. Now this is probably over complicated but I used OSFClone to make an image of the harddrive (the first 75gb was corrupt and took almost a week to copy but the rest of the 500 took the final day only) then I went file carving.

As far as actually "fixing it" however I have no clue.

 

[mrrhq]

Oh, if only electronics lasted forever. But nothing lasts forever, sadly.

 

[Reluctantly]

Yeah, that's bad; if it can't access the disk at all, something mechanical is probably damaged or malfunctioning. Putting it in the freezer can fix broken sectors because it reorients the magnetism on the platters, but it of course wouldn't fix a mechanical problem.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

Try running your manufacturers diagnostic tool for that disk, if you haven't already.
There are disk recovery services, that could help you recover data from your disk, there are some DIY methods as well.
For every important piece of information on your disk there should be a backup, hdds can fail as early as 2-5 years after purchase, two hdds with the same data are much less likely to fail at the same time, obviously, maybe some kind of a future safety guideline.

 

[Grayman]

Replace the circuit board on the drive if you can fine a new one.

 

[Grayman]

If the circuit board is fine, and it usually is, take it to a computer shop to get the data, otherwise throw it away.

If you need the data, take it to a geek shop before messing with it. They will run a program on it that repairs the header files and gets some files back although many will turn out to be corrupted.

Personally I wouldn't reuse a drive that is showing issues even if i fixed it because it is a sign that it will not last much longer even if you manage to fix it.

For a laptop, and if you have the money, get a solid state hard drive. It has no moving parts unlike the old hard drives and can be bumped around without damaging the parts inside. It runs 10x faster But you have to be willing to fork out the cash and you'll lose out on hard drive space.

 

[StevenM]

Have you tried changing the Drive letter? Instead of D:\ maybe change it to something else?

How to change the drive letter

 

[Reluctantly]

For a laptop, and if you have the money, get a solid state hard drive. It has no moving parts unlike the old hard drives and can be bumped around without damaging the parts inside. It runs 10x faster But you have to be willing to fork out the cash and you'll lose out on hard drive space.

Only problem with SSDs is that they actually aren't as reliable as the mechanical drives. For some reason they fail at a faster rate than the mechanical drives. Though I haven't checked up on it in the last year or so, so maybe this has changed now.

 

[EyeSeeCold]

Only problem with SSDs is that they actually aren't as reliable as the mechanical drives. For some reason they fail at a faster rate than the mechanical drives. Though I haven't checked up on it in the last year or so, so maybe this has changed now.

Are you referring to the excessive writes issue? I believe that's still a thing, but only a concern for enterprise environments. Besides the recent story about the Samsung EVO, I haven't seen any major news relating to failure rates for 2014.

 

[Grayman]

Only problem with SSDs is that they actually aren't as reliable as the mechanical drives. For some reason they fail at a faster rate than the mechanical drives. Though I haven't checked up on it in the last year or so, so maybe this has changed now.

Yeah, if you write and change data too much the memory, transistors, would wear out. It is better now. It will eventually wear out but you would likely replace the computer before then.

 

[Reluctantly]

Are you referring to the excessive writes issue? I believe that's still a thing, but only a concern for enterprise environments. Besides the recent story about the Samsung EVO, I haven't seen any major news relating to failure rates for 2014.

Partly, when the drives first started to come out at a more reasonable price, many of them were only rated to do so many reads and writes, which definitely sucked.

But I was referring more to the warranty failure rates for consumers. When I was looking around about a year and a half ago, I noticed there was a higher incidence of warranty failure for SSDs compared to the older hard drives when looking at a lot of customer reviews for SSDs. Of course, there were some that seemed reliable, but they had a much larger price per gigabyte, making it not worth it in my opinion.

I'm guessing with how everything seems to use SSDs now that this isn't really a problem anymore, but I don't know, as I'm not really in the market for it now. I'm happy with my 3 Terabyte HHD, coming from a 256gb. I don't have to delete games and shows to make space for more games and shows.