USB-SATA Drive will not stop

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

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?

Tom · July 20, 2016, 10:28:31 PM

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.

Mr. Analog · July 21, 2016, 07:48:53 AM

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

Mr. Analog · July 21, 2016, 09:33:32 AM

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?

Tom · July 21, 2016, 09:41:42 AM

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....

Mr. Analog · July 21, 2016, 09:55:37 AM

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

Tom · 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?

Mr. Analog · July 21, 2016, 10:30:15 AM

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

Darren Dirt · July 21, 2016, 04:36:12 PM

Saw thread title.

Expected something about a possible source for perpetual motion device.

Was disappointed

Mr. Analog · 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

Tom · July 21, 2016, 05:09:31 PM

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.

Mr. Analog · July 21, 2016, 05:11:21 PM

I'll give it a shot

Sent from my SM-T810 using Tapatalk

Tom · July 21, 2016, 05:12:38 PM

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?

Mr. Analog · July 21, 2016, 05:30:39 PM

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

Tom · July 21, 2016, 05:32:09 PM

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