Hard drive failure - disk reads some data, waits a long time, reads some more, repeat
 

My hard drive is dying.. or maybe its dead already. It takes it forever to read a little amount of data, like an hour to read a few 100kb. I really need the stuff on it, but its 500gb. Any suggestions how I can recover my data?

Any error messages? What OS? What type of drive, IDE Sata, Scsi Etc... How many drives in the system total? Is it master slaved, if so, which? Internal or external?

i took it out of my box cause it was causign so much problems
its in an enclosure right now. drive is a maxtor diamondmax 11, 6H500RO
SATA

using windows xp sp3
error messages when they appear are something along the lines of 'The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.'

Your best bet is take the drive out, set it to "slave" (often involves moving a jumper) and put into another computer, and then try copying off your data.

The long delay you're experiencing now is likely due to your operating system (ie. Windows) and/or programs frequently accessing (especially during writes) the drive and hitting some bad sectors over and over.

If the drive was dead, it wouldn't read at all. So there's still time, but key is to limit data reads/writes during the recovery process before it dies completely, which it likely will very soon.

Ron

Is there a good utility that can i run before right after the BIOS?
Like right now i dont even hear it working anymore.. windows explorer just freezes when i open it

Is there a good utility that can i run before right after the BIOS?
Like right now i dont even hear it working anymore.. windows explorer just freezes when i open it

Never heard of anything to recover stuff that will load right after the POST (could be something, but who knows)

If you can manage to get into windows with the hard drive set as slave DO NOT try to open it from explorer or any other way. Get software like Get Data Back by Runtime Software - http://www.runtime.org/. It's not expensive and works good to recover files.

I've used it a few times and it has always gotten all my shit back. The only time it didn't work is when the drive was not detected at all (bios and windows)

After you install it check if your bad hdd is listed and start the recovery.

also, install the program on the working hard drive and not on the one that you want to recover.

I just had the same issue with my 500 gig external. I did a search on google and found an update to install and fix the errors and it worked. I suggest that.

you can put the hd in the freezer over night. Then when you put it back into your pc sometimes you get enough time before the drive heats up to get your data back.

..the end is near.... i did it my wayyyyyyyyyyyyy

I was just going to suggest that. I've done it before and it worked like a charm. I suggest putting it in a ziploc or wrapping it in saran wrap first though.

:pimp

If it's heat related then make sure you have a big-ass fan pointing at it while you attempt to recover your data.

If your box supports a chassis fan in front of the hard drive then you should install one. All of mine have at least one chassis fan dedicated to cooling HDs.

It could also be a servo positioning error which is probably more terminal, since the drive cannot reliably determine where it's supposed to position the head to read track X. I had a WD drive fail like this a week after I bought it. It's in a RAID system so I didn't bother trying to fix it.

Myst, both Seagate and WD have tools you can download to test their drives. Any generic tool will also do the trick, but the vendor specific ones may give you additional diagnostic modes or messages when matched to the same brand drive.

Seagate own Maxtor so Seatools appears to support that brand. I recommend you burn the DOS version to a CD, the Windows version may not be able to access the controllers/drives directly. You'll need to have the drive installed on a native SATA port.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/sup...oads/seatools/

http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/
100% recovery
pricey - standard service level is sufficient

It is where the government goes.