Question: So like 4 days ago my HDD wasn’t showing up in Windows one time when I turned it on, so I shutdown, checked the cables and turned it on again and it showed up.
So I thought I was all good. Then it happened again, and was really slow to use. So I checked SMART with cryataldiskinfo and it said caution, for pending, uncorrectable and reallocated sectors. One was at like 700 and the other 2 were the exact same number, around 10k, don’t remember which were which tho, sorry.
So I started copying my importabt files off the drive, and the 700 went up to 900 something during that time. Then, I used Macrium reflect to image 2 partitions on my HDD, F: and I:.
However, when I tried E:, I got error 6 MFT corrupt and it said to run chkdsk. I tried but it said I need to unmount it, which I did but at stage 4 it was insanely slow, like estimating 100 hours, so I cancelled it. But I did choose to do it on reboot. I rebooted once, and the drive didn’t show up. Again and no drive in Windows. But the third time it showed up, so I tried a different file copier that works for broken drives. During this process the drive disappeared again.
I rebooted, and now it’s in stage 4 of CHKDSK before it’s in Windows, 338 of 331760 estimating 30 hours. Is there a point of letting this run, or should I just reboot. And what’s the best course of action to save some of my data?
Seagate Seatools did say the drive passed SMART and Drive Self Test, but idk how that’s possible…
Thanks for all the help!!
Answer:
Oxidisation on Western Digital (and Samsung) PCBs:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=86&t=649
Yup, my head stack pads looked pretty close to the 3rd one. I decided to try the drive in an external enclosure after giving it a light scrub, I’m getting 1-4MB/s out of the drive due to the heads parking every second… will need to do more PCB-level investigation tomorrow. Worst case, at least I got to confirm the drive contains nothing of importance.
Edit: stuffed the drive in the enclosure (instead of leaving it in open air) and it started clicking less often after warming up a bit. Must have a bad solder joint somewhere. Might be salvageable as a temp drive.
Edit2: dying drive is still going. Got a new external SATA enclosure with USB3/UASP support to see if I could get the remaining data off any faster and also be able to monitor SMART status along the way. Interestingly enough, all error counters are staying at 0. Whatever is causing the odd seek/park activity does not appear to be related to anything media-related. I also attached oscilloscope probes to three power rails on the drive and can see 20mV transients on the +/-5V rails going to the head assembly coinciding with the anomalous seeks. Whenever the drive works normally for a few seconds, the peak-to-peak supply noise closer to 40mV, so the transients are likely a side-effect of whatever the problem is. I thought the problem may be caused by a defective G-sensor but I’m not seeing the head load/unload count tick up either, so the head rack noise I’m hearing (much louder than a normal seek, though much quieter than heads crashing into end-stops when heads go bad and can’t track position anymore) apparently isn’t that despite the head flight hiss briefly pausing.