Computer program for fixing damaged hard drives - tech support wanted

sp5it is giving you excellent advice. Take it. You asked for help and got it. Now follow his lead.

Put it in the freezer for 30 minutes and have recordable media at the ready and work quickly. It might take a few attempts, but I recovered all of my brother’s family pictures from an ’05 Sony VAIO and he was quite happy, but there wasn’t going to be a fourth attempt, things were that dire.

Chris

If the HD is failing the first thing I would do is to clone or image it immediately to another physical drive to save off as much data as possible. A clone would be an exact representation of the failing drive while an image requires you to restore it to another HD in order to access the data. You can use Macrium reflect to clone or image the bad drive.

If the HD is physically failing there’s really nothing you can to to salvage it in my opinion in my experience.

I think the hard drive is just a little bit damaged.

Last time I checked on HDD Regenerator's progress, it was about two-thirds done, and it had found one "delay."

LMAO

I have plenty of 5TB external hard drives, but I want to get a couple of 14TB or 16TB external hard drives.

Unfortunately, they are quite pricey!

I don't doubt it is great advice, but there's more than one way to skin a cat, and I'm taking a different path.

It depends if the platters are damaged, if they are okay you can carefully harvest and transplant it into a new housing but its very tedious and time consuming and I highly recommend against doing it yourself as mistakes can happen especially if you really want to recover the data.

Oh hell no…… please don’t advise people to put a drive in the freezer…. its only going to make things worse and more than likely ruin any chance a professional can recover the data if you absolutely needed it….

Hey, I didn’t just pull that out of my ass and it worked in our instance and my bro got all of his family pictures and other data off of it, so look at the scoreboard!

To be fair, the drive was toast after that, but it had been toasty for a year before that until I started hitting things with a hammer.

We’re #1, we’re #1!

Chris

HDD Regenerator is done.

Here are the results.

It found 3 delays.

I don't know if I ran the program correctly, so I don't know if the delays got fixed or not.

I am now copying data that is on the bad hard drive to a good hard drive.

I tried SpinRite, but it doesn't recognize drives attached via USB, so I couldn't run it.

I'll run HDD Regenerator again later (the right way), and then I think I'll put my mom's hard drive back in her laptop and hope I don't run into more trouble.

Okay, I did things out of order.

I should have copied the data first, then run HDD Regenerator.

I didn't have any negative consequences, but maybe I'll remember for next time.

Alright then, I don’t mean to sound like an a**hole but, if you already planned on doing what you were going to do. Why ask for help? It’s a rhetorical question really. Hope you can get what you need from you drive.

¯\

Re-read the OP and you'll see that I was asking for a specific type of help.

Robin Dobbie was helpful, and I am still open to help, especially that type of help.

I re-ran HDD Regenerator.

I guess I ran it correctly the first time.

This time it found 1 delay instead of 3.

When you get warnings about driver failure in BIOS etc. and / or critical SMART values. Then take copy of the driver asap, to save the files that can be saved, and replace it with a new one. Re-formating and reinstall the system could possible help, though I would never take that chance with a HDD that had this kind of problem. An external backup HDD using good backup routines is absolute essential.

One of old but still under active development is HDAT2. It can scan, repair and isolate bad sectors of HDD.
Also one time ago one of my HDD fail with SMART failure error but still working without problem for months. Yes I backup my files.

HDAT2 looks promising.

Do you know if it will work on a hard drive attached via USB?

Clone the drive. Then leave it alone.
Always work from the copy.
After you have saved your data you might try to revive the HD.
It is often a damaged bootsector, or the index sectors.

I don't know what's wrong with the hard drive, but I just ordered a solid state drive to replace it.

I'm still having problems with it, and SSDs are, of course, awesome.

My mom's laptop is kinda old, but I know it'll be good enough for her with a very nice SSD.

...

By the way, my mom's laptop has worked great for years until just recently.

Sure the hard drive was slow as molasses, but I'll be fixing that with a Samsung 860 EVO 500GB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD.

(https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0781Z7Y3S)

So this hard drive failure may be a blessing in disguise.

My mom didn't want me opening up her laptop for the longest time, but since I thought I had to get the defective drive out, I might as well do the one simple upgrade that everyone (in my opinion) should do.