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Unwell external HD

Nic Robinson

Nic Robinson

Moderator
One of my 4TB backup disks has gone wrong. Spins up but won't mount. It's formatted NTFS and I can't get it to mount on Mac (NTFS for Mac), Windows or Linux - so I'm thinking it's dead.

The good news is everything is backed up elsewhere, twice (I'm a bit anal).

The only small exception is a very few video files which were brand new the last time it worked and so never got backed up. They're not of any real consequence but it would be good to retrieve them if there is a way.

Not wanting to spend time or money beyond the minimum as it's no big deal...but any suggestions of some things I could try?
 
I know of a member of our Apple group who has used
https://www.dq-int.co.uk/portsmouth-data-recovery/
to get a drive recovered. I have met some of the people that work there - they started out working at IBM in Havant in the disk drive assembly area before the work was migrated out to other places. They then set up a data recovery business in Portsmouth.
Give them a call and if interested drive your drive to them.
 
In Linux do you have the utilities Disks or gparted? If so does this utility see the disk? A disk won't mount if its not formatted (I'm thinking that the disk initialisation may have been screwed) but that doesn't mean that the disk itself is bad and the data will still be there unless you hear scraping noises! If you can see the disk that clears the USB cable, the disk controller and the disk itself. If not you have some more checking to do.

Fingers crossed,

DV
 
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I'm with @monkfish - if it's in an external enclosure, take it out and try it in a PC; you may be lucky. The few times I've looked into drive recovery companies on behalf of friends it's been a hugely expensive enterprise.
There are some PC (and likely Mac) programs that attempt to recover files from damaged discs but they're unlikely to be as successful as recovery companies are, as the latter often take the drives apart and rebuild the platters in a different drive.

Mick
 
Many moons ago I used a slightly hooky version of DataRescue on my Mac to retrieve some files from a corrupted disk. Assuming this is the same app it seems the current demo version still allows you to see what the full app could recover, so it might be worth a punt. Looks like the cost for the full version isn't quite as spendtastic as it used to be, but I only glanced at the 'from $19' bit.

https://www.prosofteng.com/mac-data-recovery
 
As others have said above, mechanical disks rarely just fail totally, so the USB drive controller is the first suspect.
SSDs do have a habit of just failing catastrophically.
 
I am sure I had a similar thing recently, linux would not pick up an HD, pluging into windows also did not recognise it (no mac, sorry!)

I did something like go into disk manager in windows and the disk was there, showing as healthy, but no drive letter. I assigned a drive letter and then ran chkdsk on the volume and all was good - however I may have just got lucky :)

S
 
snowflake said:
I am sure I had a similar thing recently, linux would not pick up an HD, pluging into windows also did not recognise it (no mac, sorry!)

I did something like go into disk manager in windows and the disk was there, showing as healthy, but no drive letter. I assigned a drive letter and then ran chkdsk on the volume and all was good - however I may have just got lucky :)

S
Click to expand...
Thats something completely different. I am surprised that you didn't manage to mount the disk in Linux. What version are you using?

Windows will only mount partitions that have been assigned a Windows drive letter but UNIX lookalikes (Linux, macOS) don't need this.

For information I have found some weird behaviour with early USB 3.0 devices (USB sticks, HDD, SSD and CD/DVD) that is when plugged into a modern USB 3.1 port they aren't recognised by any O/S. The fix I found for these was to use a USB 2 extension cable that blocks out the USB 3 connections i.e. downgrades to USB 2 these USB 3 devices then do work but at the lower throughput.

Never a dull moment eh?

DV
 
DV,

Linux versions are Mint, Ubuntu, and Kali (Debian, in a nutshell).....my memory is vague as so much goes wrong so often, but it may have mounted in Linux, but the data could not be accessed/copied/moved/was not visible, like all the files were open and locked, sort of thing.

S

PS The disk will have been a formatted in a Windows FS Fat/fat32/NTFS
 
Thanks for all the ideas folks. I'll have a play.

The thing spins quietly...and is also "seen" by the machines...just won't mount!
 
Good luck,

While I was googling to see if I could jog my memory of my fault, I also stumbled across someone who had used DD to image a drive, then mounted this as an iso in windows to run chkdsk on and recovered the data.

But I imagine you couldn't be arsed with that, I certainly couldn't :)

S
 
Nic Robinson said:
Thanks for all the ideas folks. I'll have a play.

The thing spins quietly...and is also "seen" by the machines...just won't mount!
Click to expand...
I would like to know what you mean by this. Do you see the disk and its partitions? If so then the disk is working but its screwed logically somehow. I'd need to see the disk info.

Maybe you unplugged/turned-off the USB drive after some updating without a proper eject. NTFS should offer a degree of protection as it a journalled file system.........

Cheers,

DV
 
snowflake said:
DV,

Linux versions are Mint, Ubuntu, and Kali (Debian, in a nutshell).....my memory is vague as so much goes wrong so often, but it may have mounted in Linux, but the data could not be accessed/copied/moved/was not visible, like all the files were open and locked, sort of thing.

S

PS The disk will have been a formatted in a Windows FS Fat/fat32/NTFS
Click to expand...
NTFS is the Windows file system the others are general purpose and universal.

Cheers,

DV
 
Darth Vader said:
I would like to know what you mean by this. Do you see the disk and its partitions? If so then the disk is working but its screwed logically somehow. I'd need to see the disk info.
Click to expand...

No, just that there is a disc there. I'll connect it and show you what I mean via screenshot when I'm on my Mac with the NTFS software later.

Darth Vader said:
Maybe you unplugged/turned-off the USB drive after some updating without a proper eject.
Click to expand...
It's possible...
 
If you are going to use a Mac can you also launch terminal then plug in your disk and type diskutil list and post the result.

If you are saying that when you plug in your USB disk it appears as an icon on the screen then the disk is 'alive' and we need to figure out what has been screwed up.

Fingers crossed,

DV
 
No idea if its any use, but if you can recognise the disc in another machine or caddy/enclosure but not see that data, I just bought a SanDisk SD card for my camera and it came with a 2 year subscription to some data recovery software, I may be trying this shortly to see if I can get the data off my Netgear NAS box which has gone the same way.
 
Darth Vader said:
If you are going to use a Mac can you also launch terminal then plug in your disk and type diskutil list and post the result.

If you are saying that when you plug in your USB disk it appears as an icon on the screen then the disk is 'alive' and we need to figure out what has been screwed up.

Fingers crossed,

DV
Click to expand...
Sorry DV been tied up with other stuff. Here's the output (it is being seen):

/dev/disk3 (external, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *4.0 TB disk3

1: Microsoft Reserved ⁨⁩ 134.2 MB disk3s1

2: Microsoft Basic Data ⁨⁩ 4.0 TB disk3s2
 
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