Command-line or other troubleshooting a damaged [apparently] HDD?

cognus · 13 Jan 2022

Guys, I too have a sickly Seagate ST1000LM 035-1RK172 HDD like others I've seen posted here and elsewhere.
I am not highly skilled on HDD resurrection so if you can point me to a good tutorial, I would like to attempt to do enough troubleshooting to see if I can force this thing, through command-line arguments or something, to hang with me long enough to see what the root of the trouble is.

Any links or subforums or whatever that are more than just echo-chamber would be most appreciated.. The drive will not stay in communication for more than a few seconds, and then only randomly - I have to 'get lucky'
Image below shows lucky brief seconds when I was able to at least get the basic ID

Command-line or other troubleshooting a damaged [apparently] HDD?-img_2649.jpg

dalchina · 13 Jan 2022

Hi, your first task is to assess its state. Meanwhile avoid writing to it.

It seems from your screenshot this is an external USB disk

Assuming you can connect it to a working PC:
Get a copy of Hard Disk Sentinel (excellent - appraisal right on its GUI when you run it. Functional trial).
Run that (portable version is available) and post the outcome. It should look something like this (green is good):

Command-line or other troubleshooting a damaged [apparently] HDD?-1.jpg

If your disk is actually failing, then resurrection is irrelevant- at best you could be trying to recover any data on it that you need that is not backed up.

Therefore I ask- is the data on it already backed up?

MaloK · 13 Jan 2022

The most rapid drive degradation I have ever seen:

Command-line or other troubleshooting a damaged [apparently] HDD?-screenshot00203.jpg

Me I think I'm going to pass on that and bin the disk.

The question is: Are you playing with the disk to get more skills in disk recovery or are you trying to Recover Data seriously ?

At the moment if you have erratic connection to the drive any attempt to modify things will result in worsening the situation.

For all this to work you need to be able to establish a solid connection to the drive.

If the Drive is in a USB enclosure the first step is to eliminate that from the equation and use a Direct SATA connection on any computer you have.

The second thing I do is to use SpinRite 6.0 to verify the disk in read only... If the Disk Fails on POST or With I/O errors you may have a damaged Logic board and there's nothing much you can do except to replace it with an exact same Version, Revision and Firmware board. If the disk accept to run SpinRite go at level 2 if you want to recover data and level 5 to recover the disk (Destructive).

There is also another software named HDAT2 that is free and can do the same kind of work, but I'm used to SpinRite since a long time.

The slight downside is, both these utilities need to work in Real mode and require at least CSM to be usable. They work directly on the hardware level and therefore are less influenced by external factors.