HD Failure help needed

darragh o meara

Hopefully someone here can point me in the right direction.

Background:

Over the past 2-3 weeks, I have been consolidating all my photos onto 1 drive so that I can catalog and sort them out once and for all.

Yesterday, I completed the last transfer to my new "Photo Drive" a yr old Seagate 4TB external which has seen very minimal use in that time. As I was using Mac and Windows PC's I formatted the drive as exFAT and copied over all the photos on my Mac and followed up with all the photos from various EXT HD's I have here. About 1.5TB in total.

Last night, I decided to try and start cataloging the photo's so setup a master folder and some sub folders. This went well for about 2 hours when I started to get the odd error saying that the files I was trying to copy were no longer in the folder I was copying from, This was my first alarm bell... After the 2nd or 3rd one of these errors I decided to stop and power down the drive but before I got the chance to eject it I got the following error "There is a problem with this drive, Scan the drive now and fix it" I did the scan and it basically said it couldn't repair it.

Going back to the drive in File Explorer its showing me all of the files apart from the stuff I had just copied over to the drive ie. all my photos.

I have a file recovery program scanning my drive and I can see the majority of the missing files however, its an expensive piece of software. Thing is the software is reporting them in a directory called E:\MoreFiles which is not visible in DOS or in the visible/hidden file structure on the drive. Is there a way to access this folder without paying for recovery software?

Can anyone shed any light on how this might have happened? The drive is reporting only having 300gb used ( Pretty much everything other that the photos on the drive ) In all my years of dealing with computer problems, I have never seen a HD to fail in such a manner. When I run the CHKDSK it came back with some corrupt files which I fixed but this hasn't brought back my files. All the other scan tools show the drive as working fine. My usual interaction with a failing drive involves either a mechanical failure or complete data loss, in this case I didn't loose everything. Are fails like this common nowadays?

Finally, I definitely didn't delete this folder accidentally. I'm pretty sure I have all the files scattered across a few HD's but could really do with getting this file back to be 100% sure.

Help graciously appreciated.

Johnboy1951

Once you copied and not moved the originals you should at minimum be able to repeat the process you just went through.

When meeting something like this I suggest inspecting the drive from a Linux distro.

That might allow you to confirm the situation.

When satisfied, you could try something like this
https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva
which might help.

darragh o meara

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

Once you copied and not moved the originals you should at minimum be able to repeat the process you just went through.

When meeting something like this I suggest inspecting the drive from a Linux distro.

That might allow you to confirm the situation.

When satisfied, you could try something like this
https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva
which might help.

Thank you for the reply. Havent used Linux in a long time so not even sure where I could get a copy but i will take a look on Mr Google and see what he comes up with?

Johnboy1951

darragh o meara wrote: »

Thank you for the reply. Havent used Linux in a long time so not even sure where I could get a copy but i will take a look on Mr Google and see what he comes up with?

There are probably a couple of distros aimed specifically at recovery which would have lots of tools built in.
Any distro should be able to 'look at' the contents of the drive.

There might be something in this or other lists that would suit your requirements
https://opensource.com/life/15/2/five-specialized-linux-distributions-computer-repair

In your situation I would be inclined to first clone that drive to preserve everything.

darragh o meara

Cheers, downloading one now.

riclad

If data is important You should have 2backups of the files in 2different places Eg 2separate drives
and maybe online storage Google drive. Dropbox etc
hardrives have limited lifespan. They wear out
Or else the data becomes unreadable
2 times I had c drive fail to boot up windows
I was able to recover all the files using a Linux live cd or by using recuva. Sometimes Windows
Boot files become corrupted or do not work properly
Causing boot errors in Windows
Cannot load OS etc
Download a Linux iso 32bit. Linux mint is easy to use and
Has a similar interface to Windows 7
Make a live cd copy the files to 2separate places when u have time to do so
Google recover data using Linux live cd
I would just copy all the photos first to another drive there's no guarantee youll be able to clone the whole drive. It might
Stop working at some point

FreshCoffee

It appears that for whatever reason the drive is failing. (External drives can experience bangs and knocks that will affect the reliability of the drive and shorten it's life).

You really need to start again with a known good drive. You can run all the recovery software you want but it's highly likely you will not recover everything and many files you think are recovered may have missing data. You can end up tearing your hair out trying to understand what's good, what's bad, what's there and what's missing. It might be worth it if the files are gone forever without recovery but if you have the originals I highly recommend you start again with a good drive.

You might like to install a utility on your PC that shows the internal S.M.A.R.T. data for your hard drives (including USB drives). S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. This will show you what's going on inside the drive, such as Read Error Rates, Seek Error Rates, Retry counts, Unrecorrectable Errors etc. They will also generally show a Health Status of your drive. If the Health Status is not Good, I strongly recommend you immediately copy what you need off it and stop using it.

I use CrystalDiskInfo (https://crystalmark.info/en/) but there are others.

ED E

Testdisk is free and will do everything you need.

Stop until you have a fresh disk, tested it good (will take about a day for a 6TB) and then are ready to copy everything you can find off it. Scrubbing could cause it to drop entirely then you'll be foooked.

darragh o meara

FreshCoffee wrote: »

It appears that for whatever reason the drive is failing. (External drives can experience bangs and knocks that will affect the reliability of the drive and shorten it's life).

You really need to start again with a known good drive. You can run all the recovery software you want but it's highly likely you will not recover everything and many files you think are recovered may have missing data. You can end up tearing your hair out trying to understand what's good, what's bad, what's there and what's missing. It might be worth it if the files are gone forever without recovery but if you have the originals I highly recommend you start again with a good drive.

You might like to install a utility on your PC that shows the internal S.M.A.R.T. data for your hard drives (including USB drives). S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. This will show you what's going on inside the drive, such as Read Error Rates, Seek Error Rates, Retry counts, Unrecorrectable Errors etc. They will also generally show a Health Status of your drive. If the Health Status is not Good, I strongly recommend you immediately copy what you need off it and stop using it.

I use CrystalDiskInfo (https://crystalmark.info/en/) but there are others.

Thanks, I have some Seagate Iron wolf drives ordered and to be delivered in the next day or so, these were intended for the Synology NAS (to be my second backup) I also purchased this week. As soon as they arrive I’m gonna replace the back up drive with one of them, at least it will be a decent unit and not some budget drive. I have a friend at work who can get high quality 10TB toshiba enterprise HD’s so will ask him about getting some of those and buying a raid enclosure. They use those drives in the servers at work so they must be decent.

The original plan was to put it all into a 1TB SSD but I ran out of space, however by the time I actually get the files sorted and delete all the duplicates they should all fit there.

I ran a SMART test on the drive and it came back fine which I wasn’t expecting, I’m wondering if a glitch in the enclosure could have caused an issue while I was cataloging the files. Seems a bit suss that just the recently copied stuff disappeared, at the time I was expecting some randomware screen to pop up.

darragh o meara

ED E wrote: »

Testdisk is free and will do everything you need.

Stop until you have a fresh disk, tested it good (will take about a day for a 6TB) and then are ready to copy everything you can find off it. Scrubbing could cause it to drop entirely then you'll be foooked.

I will try that when I get the drives I ordered. Thank you very much.

FreshCoffee

darragh o meara wrote: »

I ran a SMART test on the drive and it came back fine which I wasn’t expecting, I’m wondering if a glitch in the enclosure could have caused an issue while I was cataloging the files. Seems a bit suss that just the recently copied stuff disappeared, at the time I was expecting some randomware screen to pop up.

Did you run a utility that shows the SMART data or just a go/nogo test? I recommend if possible looking at the raw SMART data as you may spot an issue.

Nonetheless although SMART is not invincible (especially in the area of drive failure prediction) if it's currently reporting the drive as healthy it does look as if you may just be experiencing basic file corruption. FAT (and exFAT) are very weak in this area. You may have had a flaky connection between the drive and one of the PC's (or a flaky connection inside the drive housing) or of course the old chestnut of disconnecting the drive before the PC/MAC has closed off all open files and flushed the cache. It's worth noting that this activity can take much longer if a lot of small files have been recently copied. It goes without saying how important it is to use the 'safely remove hardware' command before removing a USB drive.

If you repeat the file copying exercise with a new drive I would recommend sticking with NTFS which is far more robust in this area. You might consider buying an NTFS driver for the MAC to support this. The Paragon and Tuxera drivers are very well regarded and cost less than 20 euro.

I am still of the opinion from experience that file recovery software may cause you more grief than the effort in re-copying your files to a new drive. File recovery software should really be regarded as a last resort when all other options are exhausted. It may be that some file recovery program you find may run and recover all files intact and even successfully re-build the file structure but I think it's very unlikely, especially in a corrupted exFAT drive. When we are talking about many thousands of small photo files it's very difficult to verify them all as perfectly recovered and none missing.

Finally (a hard lesson I learned many moons ago) when copying a large number of files I always use a compare program to read back & ensure all files have copied correctly. I use Total Commander (it's in the synchronize Dirs function) to copy and compare but there are plenty of others. It gives a certain amount of peace of mind where unreplaceable data is concerned. Of course as others have said a good backup system is essential in all cases.