USB-SATA Drive will not stop

Started by Mr. Analog, July 20, 2016, 10:04:55 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Mr. Analog

Was going through old hard drives and one hit a bad sector while I was using it and didn't shut down properly. I removed it and went about the rest of my day. I tried plugging it back again and running chkdsk which made it 97% and then hung

Now my OS sees the disk but can't interact with it because it sees it as "busy" all the time, it's like it's stuck doing something but I can't stop it.

I've tried different USB ports and even a different machine... I'm starting to wonder if the disk is hooped or if something else can be done, it's like once this thing gets power it just spins up and never spins down.

Any ideas?
By Grabthar's Hammer

Tom

How hard would it be to take the hdd out of the case? Try it direct connected, and pull out the good old trusty ddrescue/gddrescue.
<Zapata Prime> I smell Stanley... And he smells good!!!

Mr. Analog

It's not in a case, it's a spare drive I hooked up via a dock
By Grabthar's Hammer

Mr. Analog

Also the dock I hooked up shows up as USB-SATA but in reality it's using the ATA port

Windows will no longer assign it a drive letter and shows the device as "busy" at all times, so I'm wondering if there's a way to image this drive virtually to recover it.

I haven't used ddrescue before, is it capable of picking up the pieces?
By Grabthar's Hammer

Tom

If it's a sata drive I'd suggest hooking it up directly internally. Remove the dock as a potential cause.

If the drive still won't show up, you might be out of luck. If the controller on the drive itself is having issues, there's not a lot you can do. Some people used to try controller swaps if they had identical drives, but drives these days are individually characterized and that data is saved to a little SRAM chip on the controller board, and one drives data may not work on another's... Swapping that data over is a bit more difficult....
<Zapata Prime> I smell Stanley... And he smells good!!!

Mr. Analog

No this is a 16 year old ATA drive hooked up through a USB dock. It worked fine once but when I reconnected it again to back up more it wouldn't mount properly (but still had a drive letter) so I ran chkdsk on it and it seemed to be doing ok until the command prompt window crashed. From then on it's just been spinning
By Grabthar's Hammer

Tom

Yeah, its often a good idea to image a drive right away rather than try to run something like chkdsk.

Maybe leave it off for a while?
<Zapata Prime> I smell Stanley... And he smells good!!!

Mr. Analog

Quote from: Tom on July 21, 2016, 10:22:33 AM
Yeah, its often a good idea to image a drive right away rather than try to run something like chkdsk.

Maybe leave it off for a while?

I tried again this morning, I'll try again in a few days.

Nothing critical but it was fun to see old stuff again
By Grabthar's Hammer

Darren Dirt

Saw thread title.

Expected something about a possible source for perpetual motion device.

Was disappointed ;)
_____________________

Strive for progress. Not perfection.
_____________________

Mr. Analog

Quote from: Darren Dirt on July 21, 2016, 04:36:12 PM
Saw thread title.

Expected something about a possible source for perpetual motion device.

Was disappointed ;)

My rage could have fueled a few hundred hours last night after I realized I had an opportunity to backup a chunk of my personal history but didn't

I actually found the old Flash cartoons I made in 1999!

I just hope I can recover this old crap
By Grabthar's Hammer

Tom

Quote from: Mr. Analog on July 21, 2016, 05:04:07 PM
Quote from: Darren Dirt on July 21, 2016, 04:36:12 PM
Saw thread title.

Expected something about a possible source for perpetual motion device.

Was disappointed ;)

My rage could have fueled a few hundred hours last night after I realized I had an opportunity to backup a chunk of my personal history but didn't

I actually found the old Flash cartoons I made in 1999!

I just hope I can recover this old crap
Hm, being an older drive might save your butt. If its still dead next time you try it, you could attempt to grab another identical drive, and swap the controller boards.

re: ddrescue, its a brute force raw copy tool that'll retry a certain number of times using multiple strategies, and eventually give up on absolutely dead sectors. So you end up with a good chunk of data, rather than nothing.
<Zapata Prime> I smell Stanley... And he smells good!!!

Mr. Analog

I'll give it a shot

Sent from my SM-T810 using Tapatalk

By Grabthar's Hammer

Tom

I guess another question is: Is it making any kind of non regular spinny or arm-movy noises? Any clicking or grinding that is abnormal?
<Zapata Prime> I smell Stanley... And he smells good!!!

Mr. Analog

It's noisy as hell but then again it always was
By Grabthar's Hammer

Tom

Quote from: Mr. Analog on July 21, 2016, 05:30:39 PM
It's noisy as hell but then again it always was
I presume its regular old HDD whirring, and some clicking as it does its thing... a dead hd click is something a little more frightening ;)
<Zapata Prime> I smell Stanley... And he smells good!!!