3 years, 4 months ago-
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I have a failing 3TB Hard drive that I would like some help with. It is formatted as a data drive with NTSF. I use (alternately ) 2 ssd’s to boot from: 1 with Windows 7 the other with Linux.
The 3TB drive started to display thumbnails of the folders a lot slower than normal when I was using the Linux ssd. I am new to Linux. I switched to it upon the demise of Win 7 in Jan 2020. Linux is supposed to be able to work with NTSF formatted drives but I read somewhere that it deals with files differently than Windows does. Thinking that might have something to do with the problem, I booted from the ssd that uses Win 7. Things seemed better for a little while then again folder thumbnails were slow to show up etc.
THAT”S when I should have backed it up. Like an idiot I decided to run disk check on it. Since there is only about 87 gigs still free out of 3 TB, the disk check was going to take some time to run so I left it going & went to work. 9 or 10 hours later I returned to find Windows frozen. The disk check had only completed about 1/2 way and the disk felt pretty hot to the touch.
Even though the operating system(s) are on other drives, the PC will not boot up with this drive installed. If I take it out the PC boots fine. I have connected it via usb with various results. Some times Windows does not see it at all. Sometimes I can go into device manager and it will see it but not let me assign a drive letter to it.
I found several data recovery programs and briefly tried them.Most do not see the drive. 1 or 2 did however. I was afraid to do anything until I got a replacement drive. I have another 3TB drive. Can’t clone it because apparently to do that a bigger destination drive is required. So I was thinking of coping & pasting content. My concern is that I don’t want to do further damage from heat or what have you. So I thought I would wait and get some advice on how to proceed. I read that you can image the drive and that that would be faster than copying folder by folder. I would appreciate ideas on this as well as recommendations on Data Recovery programs. It has been a few months since I tried to do anything with this and now I can’t remember which programs were able to see the drive.
By the way, the drive does not make any mechanical noises such as clicking. You can hear it spin up but it is faint. I have no interest in trying to repair or save the drive itself since it is at least 5 years old. I would just like to get what I can off of it before it totally dies.
Would appreciate help with this! Thanks so much. -
Hello Rick,
This is why it is imperative to always have a home backup or an off site backup such as iDrive.
You will want to start off by booting up one of your operating systems first, then connect the 3TB failing disk. If you operating system does not lock up and the disk is detected after refreshing device manager (Windows) Linux should auto detect. Then you can attempt rebuilding the partition table and then recovering your data with Test Disk which you an acquire here along with some how to articles here.
A last ditch effort which can be pricey would be to use a professional data recover service such as Drive Savers.
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