Hard drive fail.

[hazliya]

I'd been having issues with my external hard drive, but now I think that they've all come together at once. I just installed Windows Service Pack 3, and now it refuses to acknowledge my external hard drive's existence. Plus, now Windows lags like crazy.

Yes, it recognizes that there is a drive there. I can remove it with the "remove hardware safely" window. When it pops up, Windows makes the "hey, there's a drive" noise but nothing else happens.
I've tried unplugging and replugging in every order I can think of. I've rebooted. Nothing.

I also tried to read it in Ubuntu, which has worked before, but Ubuntu said that the drive is unmountable because the drive is apparently still trying to talk to windows. Constantly.

I have no idea what to do. There's so much on this hard drive that I want to keep, but apparently can't get to at all.

This is really, really frustrating.

Is it possible to rip the hard drive part out of an external like that and read it somehow else, or does it actually have to be functioning to be readable?

I'm on the verge of tears. I moved my files onto the external so that this would not happen. Now, nowhere is safe to keep anything important, and that's unacceptable.

Comments

[purple-dj.livejournal.com]

You can almost certainly partially dismantle the external drive and access it differently. If the problem is with the interface electronics this will fix the problem, but if it's with the drive itself it may not.

I'm confused by the "still trying to talk to windows" complaint from Ubuntu. If that's what I think it is, then the drive is marked as though Windows didn't unmount it properly at some point, but Ubuntu should provide some way to ignore that warning and read it anyways...

I know it's not going to help you right now, but there is never a "safe on one drive" solution. The only really good way is to keep multiple copies of important things on different drives in different physical places. I actually keep a backup copy of all of my photos at work and another at home, just in case one or the other building burns down.

I'm certainly willing to help recover your drive, but my schedule is pretty crazy right now. If no one else steps up to help, let me know and we can try to schedule some time.

[purple-dj.livejournal.com]

A-ha!

mount -t ntfs-3g -o force,ro /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows

Or perhaps more drastically:

mount -t ntfs-3g -o force,remove_hiberfile,ro /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows

Those commands aren't exactly what you want, but if someone familiar with Linux/Ubuntu mount commands sits down to help you, one of those should get around the "still trying to talk to windows" complaint. There's all sorts of warnings in the mount manual about using "force" or "remove_hiberfile" though, which is why I also have read-only ("ro") with them.

[purple-dj.livejournal.com]

Rather, one of those examples should help whoever is helping you figure out the proper mount command to get around that issue.

[hazliya.livejournal.com]

It confused the hell out of me, too, seeing as I'd removed it from Windows safely.

I tried mounting it as read-only, but to no success. A friend of mine recommended SpinRite, so we'll see how that works.

[laurion]

That's one of the tools I have, yes. Sometimes it works great. Depends on what the problem is.

The drive is almost certainly removable from the enclosure.

Does the drive make any funny noises at all?

[crash-mccormick.livejournal.com]

Good luck. If its odd drive logic I often Run spinrite on the disk for a while since it boots a spearate little mini O?S and can sometimes mount and fix things wondows has problems with.

[purple-dj.livejournal.com]

There's also an extremely powerful free collection of tools available as SystemRescueCD (http://www.sysresccd.org) that has recovered numerous almost-dead hard drives for me. I didn't recommend it immediately since it has a learning curve like a brick wall -- if you don't have a Linux guru handy to make it work, it's almost useless.

[seishino.livejournal.com]

If the drive itself is dead, it *is* frequently possible to recover data from it from a clean room dissection (they take the hard drive platters out, and access them directly with specialized equipment). This is quite expensive though: in the ballpark of 2k dollars.

Is it clicking, or just not being picked up?

[hazliya.livejournal.com]

The drive is running fine, it's just talking jibberish to Windows. Windows says "Hey, there's something there!" but refuses to go any further.

For the record, I didn't have this problem before I re-installed XP.

[seishino.livejournal.com]

If windows is getting jibberish from it, then it's probably a firmware issue at one of the steps.

I'd guess the steps are then:
1. Eliminate your computer's USB system as a possible problem. Does it do the same thing on A's machine?
2. Eliminate the enclosure as a possible problem. Swap it into a different enclosure, or into a tower.
3. Run software diagnostics on it, just for the heck of it.
4. Switch HDD's own logic board chipset for a replacement one from the exact same drive. Or pay someone to do it, as that would still be much cheaper than pulling the platters out.