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Can I do a low-level format to rescue this drive? - my BAD
I'm posting this thread about a Hitachi 7200 RPM 4 TB drive that now sells for about $125 on Newegg. The drive is now unusable due to user stupidity (me). I'm wondering if there is any way to do a low-level format such that all the file corruption caused by me can be repaired.
A few days ago, I posted a thread in this forum (How) Can I repair this drive?, about a disk that got so messed up that chkdsk could not fix it. I'm starting a new thread because I made the original problem much, much worse.
To recap, there was a power failure in the middle of a complex operation involving a large file. After rebooting, I ran chkdsk and got this result:
Then I made the situation much worse by rerunning the same complex operation involving a file on the same drive. Each time, the application basically froze the entire system to where I had to do a reboot. I did that twice, and probably created a lot of additional disk corruption. MY BAD. Let me repeat. MY BAD. .
I was able to salvage some files from the disk by copying them off to another drive, and then deleting them to clear disk space, but I still could not get chkdsk to fix the drive. So I reformatted the drive because maybe with a fresh format chkdsk might work. A quick format went fine. A non-quick format stalled at about 66% and stayed stuck at 66% overnight.
So I ran chkdsk again, this time with the /r option, to locate bad sectors and recover readable information. After 4 hours, was 19% complete. 11 hours later, progress went from 19% to only 25% and ETA was 44:05.
So I stopped that chdsk, and reran it, this time with /i and /c options to perform a less vigorous check of index entries, and skip checking of cycles within the folder structure. After 10 minutes, 2% complete and ETA 7:06. Good. But after 6 hours of checking, it was only 15% complete, and ETA was 33:30. Time to quit.
So this drive is hosed, or is it? I'm sure that all this corruption is bad sector data, corrupted sector headers and trailers, that was caused by the initial power failure and then me rebooting the system in the middle of a file operation. Is there any way to reformat the drive and fix all this corruption?
I've owned over 10 of these 7200 RPM Hitachi drives over the years, and I have had exactly zero problems with any of them after years of operation. This drive now lists for about $125 on Newegg, so I still want to get it working again.
EDIT: Windows Explorer shows a big red X next to the drive. I've never seen that before.
Last edited by x509; 07 Mar 2020 at 19:15.