Hard drive help needed (long)

[Senator]

One of my hard drives has failed and I need some help. Here's my setup:

Athalon 64 3200+
Albatron K8X800 Pro II
Windows XP w/ SP2

Hard drive #1 - Seagate 160GB SATA (Windows/Programs/My Documents)
Hard drive #2 - Seagate 200GB SATA (Backups)
Hard drive #3 - Seagate 400GB SATA hard drive on an add-on PCI SATA controller card. The drive has two partitions. One holds my MP3 collection; the other is a TrueCrypt encrypted volume. This is the problem drive.

Yesterday the third (and newest) drive began showing signs of failure. I heard clicking when trying to transfer files from this drive to my MP3 player. The file transfer speed varied greatly. Several files would transfer quickly, then it would seem to hang up on the next file. I stopped the transfer, and retried several times with the same result. The drive stopped responding shortly thereafter.

I rebooted, but Windows would never get to the account logon screen before rebooting again. I removed the SATA cable from the third drive and Windows loaded without problems. Hoping it might be a problem with the PCI SATA controller card, I attached drive #2 to the card and loaded Windows without issue, and I was able to access the drive in Windows Explorer. I then attached drive #2's SATA cable (on the motherboard) to drive #3, but saw the same rebooting isses on startup.

I tried a couple of rescue disks, but none of them recognized drive #3. Thinking it was the dreaded "click-of-death" I put the drive in a static-fee bag and a ziplock bag and placed it in the freezer for several hours. When I put the drive back in the computer, the clicking sound was gone, but the rebooting problems remained.

The rescue disks still could not see the drive, so I downloaded the hard drive tools utility from Seagate's website. The utility was able to recognize drive #3. I performed the quick diagnostic scan and the full diagnostic scan and both partitions passed. However, when I performed the file structure test both partitions failed. Unfortuanately, the report file contained basically no data either on the screen or when it was saved to the floppy disk. See screenshot.

The utility's Read Me file states "Seagate is not able to assist with troubleshooting or reviewing file system test results."

If Seagate's utility will recognize and read the drive, why won't Windows? Is there anything that can be done to recover the files, or at least put the drive back in a usable state?

If you've read this far, you have my gratitude.

 

[Modular]

Is that a Seagate 7200.10 drive?

Could it be that you have the jumpers set for 3 GB/s? Maybe that setting is too fast for the SATA card/MOBO and is causing the crashes. I don't know why it would be the case that it would suddenly cause you problems when it hasn't before though.

And that still doesn't explain your clicking noise. It sounds like the HDD is dying to me...

 

[Senator]

It's a Barracuda 7200.9. The jumper block is as it was set at the factory - on the #3 and #4 prongs, so it should be limited to 1.5 GB/s.

I've been using the drive for a couple of months with no issues. A couple of days ago I moved my MP3 collection from my primary drive to this one. I have most of the files backed up, but I had done a bunch of MP3 tag and file editing this week that I'll have to redo now.

On the bright side, this has spurred me to go out yesterday and get that 500GB external hard drive that I'd been eyeing for incremental backups.

 

[Paperdoc]

The Seagate utility was NOT able to recognize and read the drive. I'm not sure exactly what the diagnostics do, but it appears they were able to establish good communication with the drive. Thereafter, however, those utilities ran into the same problem as Windows - the data recorded on the drive cannot be read for some reason. And since it cannot even tell you about parts of the user data on each partition, it appears the problem is in the basic control structures - that is, in the partition table, directories and / or FATs. From your description, it could be corrupted data in the partition table because it cannot read any data from anywhere. The other possibility, of course, is that the trouble is not in the data on the disks, but in the reading mechanisms - the platter drive motor, the head positioners, etc. If they cannot read data, corrupted or not, you will have this problem.

The symptoms that started the whole story - clicks and slow data access - suggest strongly the drive developed a big problem independent of the partition table data. So hardware failure, not data corruption, looks most likely. Do the Seagate utilities have any tools for simply blindly copying a disk's contents completely to another drive? If you could do that, then you could try to recover the data from the copy on the good new drive. Maybe another utility can help you do that. No matter what, this 400 GB drive looks real bad. Covered by warranty?

 

[Bozo Galora]

using the freezer trick is the LAST option, since it usually can only be used once
your only 4 possibilities left are -
runtime.org's getdataback
r-studio, http://www.data-recovery-software.net/
spinrite V6
http://www.grc.com/sr/testimonials.htm
or a booted to CD of some live linux like knoppix or DSL
HOWEVER - encrypted files -
That brings up a whole new set of possibilities
You may have encrypted part (or all) of the drive somehow - like the file table
The clicking may be from XP trying to read something it cant even see as protected, due to truecrypt protocol.

BUT.......
since the freezer trick stopped the clicking, but no data still seen

I have mentioned it here often - use 7200.7 or 7200.10, no other, and the .10 320GB is avail in both IDE and SATA
Always always keep HDD below 26 degrees (hddtemp sw)
Never put HDD in external enclosure

 

[Senator]

Thanks for the suggestions and ideas, guys. Here's the latest...

I used the Test Hard Disk Drive 1.0 tool from Hiren's BootCD 8.7. The surface scan found 9 errors in one sector and repaired them. After that I booted into Windows without any problem. The drive still didn't show up in Windows Explorer, so I opened up Partition Magic to see if it showed up. It was there, but was showing as 386GB unallocated. I created a single partition, then the drive showed up in Explorer, but was empty as I expected.

A couple of different commercial recovery software trials found the deleted files and listed almost all of them as recoverable. I'm not sure if I'm going to purchase one of the programs or not. I tried a freebie recovery program, but it was not able to do an extensive scan and was not able to see the files. Like I said, I have most of the files backed up. Most of the encrypted files are backed up on an encrypted thumb drive, too. The biggest pain will be re-doing the MP3 tag info. Anyone know of any other free recovery utilities?

I'm not going to move any new files onto the drive until I decide whether to try and recover the lost files. At any rate, it appears the the drive is now working properly, and I learned more than I ever wanted to about HDD failures and troubleshooting.

Bozo Galora - how do you keep a drive below 26 degC? That's about the ambient temperature in my house. Everest is showing my three drives between 39-42 degC. I'm running three fans in an ANTEC Performance Plus server case, so there's plenty of room and good airflow. There's as much room between the drives as I can manage as well.

 

[Bozo Galora]

Find a case that has a 120MM front fan and put in a Yate Loon, or a case that has transverse mounted HDD cage. I am more concerned with my HDD than my CPU or GPU temp. Thats where the data is.

For example, with a friends computer parts I just reinstalled into a new Ultra defender case, I butcher up and drill the front grill so it takes the big fan, and not the 80MM it comes with. Just for giggles, I donloaded HDD temp and HDD thermometer, installed both and checked to see what I have with an old 7200.7 80GB seagate. They both agree on the result


http://img516.imageshack.us/img516/6599/seagate80gbui4.jpg