Recovery On A Dying Hdd

I have had this 2TB internal Seagate HDD for ~5 years. It's for storage only, the OS is on another drive. Last night while qbittorent was writing something on it, the HDD started to make a repetitive, jarring sound. I was on my headphones so the sound could've been going on for a few minutes already.

Soon after when trying to access files on the drive, programs started lagging unable to read it. Qbittorrent also gave an error message. Then W10 froze completely and I had to do a hard reset.

Now after rebooting Windows' File Explorer can't see the drive. There's no letter assigned to it. Device Manager, Disk Management and Speccy see the hardware but the capacity is wrong. Speccy for example lists the size as 127GB (pic related).. this seems weird?

There's some stuff on the HDD I'd love to recover so I unplugged and set it aside for now.

What should be my next step?

 

Was it divided into more than one partition? That might explain the 127GB if the partition tables are corrupt.

You might try Recuva, from the same makers as Speccy and CCleaner.

 

try making an image with osf clone then you can mount that and try to recover data without causing more damage. If the drive is dying you don't want to keep trying stuff, get an image and work from there.

Links embedded above.

 

This is what I'm trying to do now. I booted into osfclone. It doesn't see the HDD itself but it can see the 1977MB partition.

I have a 3TB external HDD for the image. Should I use dd, AFF or EWF for the imaging format? Anything else I should do or be aware of before I start?

 

I tried pulling an AFF image from the HDD. No weird noises or issues but the process was over in just ~10min and the end result was a 50MB joke image. I mounted it with OSFMount but there's nothing there.

Maybe I messed up the recovery process or maybe the data is already gone. I don't want to damage the HDD any worse so I took it out for now while pondering my next move. I forgot to mention after the initial freeze Windows ran some HDD diagnostics stuff trying to repair it that went on for at least an hour. There were no weird loud noises during this either so I let it run. So the only time there were the weird sounds was the initial time. Now when you plug it in you just hear it spinning.

Reading up and trying to decide what to do next. I'll probably end up trying Recuva or another program at some point.

 

I would try a full drive copy using Partition wizard onto a clean hard drive- it can copy to a different size hard drive, using a duplicator, or, two external hard drive enclosures. http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/minitool_partition_wizard_home_edition.html

 

DD would be the best copy, sounds like the drive is to far gone. As for using a non-forensic drive copy, they don't copy "errors" and will possibly fail. At this level you want a bit by bit "raw" copy, no error correction. That will be done when you try to recover that data.

 

That depends on the type of error. If the data in a storage location is corrupted, the corrupted data will be copied too.