Dying WD HDD

[KamehaMayhem808]

Hello! I am a new member of the GRC community and I am hoping I can get some much needed help!

I have a WD easystore 4TB external hdd that suddenly stopped working a few days ago, and I need help retrieving the data before it's too late. Long story short...I was transferring files from my phone to the hdd and the transfer started lagging. The transfer eventually froze and stopped working, so I closed all the folders and tried again, but no luck. I reset my computer and external hdd and tried re-opening everything again, BUT the hdd that once read as "Easystore 4TB" on my PC now read as "Local Disk D" drive. When I tried to open it, I got an error that said disk is unreadable and needed to be re-formatted (I did not re-format it). I went into Disk Management in Windows and it showed the hdd as RAW. I performed a couple disk scans and some errors/bad sectors were found on the hdd. I have no idea how this happened! The hdd was never dropped nor did I physically damage it in any way. It simply stopped operating properly and now I can't even access it.

After frantically researching the problem for the past few days and finding all kinds of fixes and recovery software on the internet (easeUS, Disk Drill, Clonezilla, DMDE, etc.), my brother, who has spent decades working on computers in the Marine Corps, referred me to GRC.com and said SpinRite may be able to help. I read up on SpinRite and watched a few videos and it seems pretty legit.

So I guess my questions to the community are...would Spinrite be helpful in my situation? If my hdd has bad sectors, will SpinRite be able to fix them? My main goal is to retrieve all the data on the hdd because it's 15+ years of family memories! Will SpinRite be able to retrieve the files?? I really don't care about fixing the hdd...I just want to save the data that's on it!

I truly appreciate any answers and comments to my questions and situation. I look forward to hearing from the community soon! Thank you all in advance.

 

[PHolder]

I got an error that said disk is unreadable and needed to be re-formatted (I did not re-format it). I went into Disk Management in Windows and it showed the hdd as RAW.

If the file system is corrupted SpinRite cannot help you fix that specific problem--that is not its purpose. What SpinRite does is try (somewhat relentlessly) to read the data on failing sectors of a drive, and if it finally succeeds, it will rewrite it back to the disk, giving the drive controller a chance to relocate it if that portion of the drive is too unreliable to continue to be used. (Drives have a small portion of their space reserved for such relocations.)

Based on what you wrote, it doesn't sound like your drive is having any sort of low level issue... the issue sounds like it is at a higher level.

The good news, is that SpinRite is not likely to hurt, unless the drive is physically precarious. (Forcing a failing drive to work really hard can push it over the edge.) So you *could* try it and see if the symptoms are different than you think. (A physically failing drive will cause higher level file-system failures as well.)

If you decide to try it, be aware that SpinRite 6.1 is not optimal for use with USB devices, and there are known issues with BIOS support of USB devices, some BIOSes are buggy and SpinRite will block accessing space beyond a small limit (137G or so) on these devices. The best advice in this situation is to "shuck" the drive if possible (to extract the hardware inside the USB enclosure, and put it in a PC) but many modern devices lack the ability to do this, so it's hard to give any specific advice in this regard.

 

[KamehaMayhem808]

If the file system is corrupted SpinRite cannot help you fix that specific problem--that is not its purpose. What SpinRite does is try (somewhat relentlessly) to read the data on failing sectors of a drive, and if it finally succeeds, it will rewrite it back to the disk, giving the drive controller a chance to relocate it if that portion of the drive is too unreliable to continue to be used. (Drives have a small portion of their space reserved for such relocations.)

Thank you for the response!

So I have a toaster, or dual docking station. Would that work if I decide to "shuck" the drive? Also, if I shuck the drive and stick it in the docking station, wouldn't it have the same result as being an external hdd? I don't know...this is all new to me. During my research, I've read multiple posts saying I should clone the drive (Clonezilla, DMDE, or Disk Drill were recommended) and recover the data from the clone so I don't further damage the drive and/or data. Could this be an option, too?

 

[Tazz]

Also, be aware that SpinRite **NEEDS** to be able to boot to the old school BIOS. It WILL NOT work if you can only boot in UEFI mode.

 

[PHolder]

So I have a toaster, or dual docking station.

What is its connection means? If it too is USB that's probably not really getting you any further ahead. With SpinRite you want a SATA or IDE connection, in general, for best support.

Also, as @Tazz mentioned, you'd need to know for sure that your device can legacy boot (into the BIOS and not via UEFI) in order to even be able to run SpinRite at all. (Many modern devices do not support legacy booting... Intel wanted to kill off the BIOS starting in 2020 and many manufactures have gone along.) If you want to know about this, Steve makes software to test with (see his site.) There is Bootable for testing legacy boot, and also his ReadSpeed tool can functionally do this. ( https://www.grc.com/bootable.htm https://www.grc.com/readspeed.htm )

 

[dg1261]

So I have a toaster, or dual docking station. Would that work if I decide to "shuck" the drive?

Shucking the drive means to crack open the case and remove the hard drive inside. Older external drives were just internal SATA drives mounted in a SATA-to-USB enclosure, so if you could remove the drive you could mount it internally inside another PC and Spinrite could do its thing directly through the SATA interface instead of through a USB converter.

I think the Easystore series is 2.5" form factor, isn't it? If it has a single connecting cable, that would be 2.5" laptop size. A 3.5" desktop-size external would have two connecting cables -- one for data and one for power, typically from a AC power brick.

If it's 2.5" you're probably out of luck. While older 2.5" externals were laptop drives mounted in a case, many newer 2.5" externals do not have a SATA connector inside at all, so shucking the case gets you nowhere. If there are any screws you might explore to see if you can get into the case, but if it's all sealed up that probably indicates there won't be any SATA connector inside to utilize.

 

[peterblaise]

WD USB drives tend to have USB interfaces internally.

However, shuck it and see if it's SATA.

If SATA, then mount it internally in your computer, and proceed.

For me, TLC tender loving care from SpinRite is best provided by:

SPINRITE NORAMTEST SKIPVERIFY LEVEL 2 DYNASTAT 0 NOREWRITE

That combination has kept drives online versus running SpinRite
defaults that are more aggressive, ans for me, drives have gone offline,
requiring power cycles and manually restarting just after where it got
to on the last run.

A few weeks of that, over and over, each full run taking less time,
raised my confidence to move on to:

ddrescue

. . . and a spare drive to clone to, quite a learning curve, but able to
also do multiple runs, trying only for the sectors not previously read
and copied out.

There are tons of details to each step - let us know if you need assistance.

PS - look for a video showing how to solder a SATA socket onto a WD
USB drive circuit board - wow, I have not tried!

 

[AlanD]

If the disk is showing up as RAW in Disk Manager, that suggests that the problem could be an unreadable or corrupt Partition table or MFT. It may be that the disk sectors are perfectly readable, but without the Partition table or MFT, the drive does not know how to find them. In such a case, SR may not help, but it should not do any harm.

You could also try looking at Testdisk from https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download . This is a free utility to scan the disk and rebuild partition tables or MFT's from the files. I have also used it several times to recover deleted files.