I had too many sudden shutdowns in my desktop due to issues with power supply unit. Now today I randomly checked SMART status of my data disk, and it worries me.
Should I stop using this computer immediately until replacement arrives or order a replacement device but use it cautiously?
Seagate's SeaTools software shows SMART check PASSED and short drive test as PASSED.
This drive disappeared from CrystalDisk today. Explorer shows the drive and folder structure but does not read or create new files.
I think I lost it along with much valuable backed up data.
RIP.
Caution is actually not a good sign. Your power on hours are not too high, you were unlucky I guess. Next time be ready to take backups when you see something like this.
I personally keep my important docs & pics in HDD as well, but use Windows backup to create its backup in my ext HDD everyday. Its like 200+GB. I wanted to use cloud storage but Onedrive is not as good for sync & Google drive seems a bit expensive.
Lesson learnt. I plan to buy them in pair and keep imaging the whole drive for safety.
There are many - Testdisk, PhotoRec, Recuva. You'll have to search a bit for which one suits your needs the most. Or try all of them. I think PhotoRec does not recover file names correctly. Try Recuva first.
Those are primarily for software issue based data loss rather than physical drive damage I think.
I need something like Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier Roadkil.Net - Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier Program Download.
With that if I set it to Fastest data recovery mode, it skips any files with error and goes to the next. Useful if the damage is on the disk and not to the mechanism.
I have bought a WD 2 TB Blue hard disk and started Macrium Reflect clone operation, so far it is about 5% complete with no errors. Let us see how it goes.
I was able to successfully clone the first 1 TB partition. Cloning operation stopped on the second 512 GB partition with CRC error. Now I have started cloning the third 326 GB partition and going on so far upto 6%. But the write speed has slowed down to 10 MB/s. It was around 38 MB/s for the first partition at the beginning but slowed down to 16 MB/s later on. If this completes successfully I plan to run Roadkil's Unstopcopy on the second partition and recover whatever is possible.
Disk cloning failed for the later 2 partitions. I was able to copy most files though using Unstopcopy.
There were errors in only 1 file in the 2nd partition and 4 files in the third partition.
It seems like I might be able to use this disk for storing non-essential media if I manage to isolate the blocks in a blank partition.
Can CHKDSK give me the exact location of error?
In this endeavor I have come across two very useful utilities:
1. Repartition Bad Drive - www.dposoft.net/rbd.html
2. Victoria - Hard disk utility
