My Seagate Expansion External Harddisk had a problem and I could only access it with very low speed. I decided to remove it from the case and connect it directly to the computer. Now I can't access it at all it shows as partly as raw partly as not allocated.
Is there any solution to this?
Some external drives are purposely made not to work outside of their enclosures. However, there are often workarounds to these issues. Sometimes the solution is as simple as a jumper or it may be more complex.
You might want to search the web or YouTube for the term "shuck seagate xyz" where xyz is the model of your drive. With some luck, this may turn up a solution for your drive.
Hi @ricardobohner,
In order to troubleshoot the problem with your external Seagate expansion, you need to provide more details.
Please answer each and every question below.
1. Exact model number of the HDD and how many years old is it?
2. Is it a desktop or portable?
3. When inside its enclosure, how many partitions were there?
4. Now look at the pictures in this link Expansion drives switching to GPT | Seagate Support US and tell me whether it is an old model or new model.
Do read this thread Hard Drive seems corrupt. 1 Partition now showing now as 2 Partitions? ( actually it showed three partitions as per the original title)
Hard Drive seems corrupt. 1 Partition now showing as 3 Partitions?
( Unfortunately the OP in that thread had deleted all the screenshots but I believe your problem is similar to that of that OP. Anyway, don't do anything on your own and muck up the HDD further till my investigative process is over)
Questions:
Its a Seagate Expansion 3 TB
1. Model = ST3000DM003-1f216N
2. Desktop or Portable = Desktop
3. When enclosure how many partitions = As I remember only 1
4. Old model or new = old
I suspect that the problem referred to in the post you linked is exactly my problem, I have new hopes now. Going to try to follow the steps, thanks
OK. confirmed that the External is an XP era advance formatted MBR drive with 4096 sector size old model. When you took it out of its enclosure it misses the drive translation circuitry present in the SATA to USB bridge circuit in the enclosure that converts it to 512 sector size to make it readable with the OS.
Using TestDisk you can change the sector size to 512 and then the OS will see the drive as before. Follow the TestDisk procedure outlined in the thread Hard Drive seems corrupt. 1 Partition now showing as 3 Partitions?.
The main problem, as I suspect, is that the HDD had developed bad sectors and that is possibly the reason why it was very slow. Even when you are able to read it with TestDisk it will be slow. Posthaste copy all the data to another external drive. ( Please note you must connect that destination drive before running TestDisk for it to see the destination drive). Also be aware the data in the bad sectors is already corrupted.
Once you have copied all data to the destination drive, close TestDisk and then check your source HDD for bad sectors using Hard Disk Sentinal Hard Disk Sentinel - HDD health and temperature monitoring. If indeed it shows bad sectors, it is no longer reliable for data storage.
Good luck.
Thank you very much @jumanji It's so good have people around that use there time to help others.
I was able to access the damaged disk and make some copies, unfortunatly they are still very slow as you mentioned. Is it possible to make the changes on the disk permanent the "4096 sector" part so I can access the disk without using testdisk and go throught the menu?
I recorded a video with the best moments of the recovery process:
It so nice of you to have made a video of the recovery procedure.
As a matter of fact, you could have copied the data to another external without taking it out of the enclosure. Since you had taken it out and plugged it into SATA direct connection, we had to use TestDisk to do the software "drive Translation"
Well, no matter how long it takes to copy the data , copy all data with patience. Once the hard disk develops bad sectors it is very difficult to predict when it will fail. It may happen anytime or may not happen for a longtime. Assuming the worst case we always recommend "Copy all data at the first instance when you see it". You can always experiment later.
"I was able to access the damaged disk and make some copies, unfortunatly they are still very slow as you mentioned. Is it possible to make the changes on the disk permanent the "4096 sector" part so I can access the disk without using testdisk and go throught the menu?"
No, not possible to my knowledge.
At best, if your HDD proves to be good without any bad sectors, you can reinitialise it as a GPT drive format it and use it as a regular internal drive.. That will make the sector size to be 512 bytes per sector and readable by the OS but formatting will erase all data present.
If your data recovery problem is solved, please mark it as solved. That will help others looking for a solution for a problem like this.
Not sure if my calculations are right but I have a 3 TB HD from which it is 2.5 GB Full. It takes 1 H 35 Minutes to save 3 GB
1 H 35 Min = 95 Min
2.5 TB = 2560 GB
(2560 / 3) = 853,33 * 95 min = 81066 minutes
81066 / 60 = 1351 Hours to recover all the files....
I guess I'll have to check for important personal suff and just download the rest again, downloading is faster than recovering at that speed.
Yes, save your important files first.
This episode should make you realise how important it is to backup all important data. A backup is not a backup if the data is not present in two media. If one fails, you always have it in the other and no heart burn.
( Whenever I make changes in my personal data, that night before going to bed, I switch on my dock and run Syncback free - SyncBackFree - free backup software for Windows - to copy all personal data to an hdd on the dock. The OS is backed up with Macrium Reflect whenever there is a major change or once in a month)
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