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I have HDD-related question. I got two hard drives, one is SSD with the system, the other is 1TB West Digital Blue HDD. System is Windows 7.

All of sudden there was a problem launching one application, so out of ideas I just restarted the PC.

From this point I was unable to go past windows loading screen unless I plugged out HDD. The system hangs trying to read the drive. If I use hot plug, then system detects HDD just as one drive (it was partitioned), then hangs untill I remove the drive. I have tried connecting it to another PC, it hangs too.

The problem is, I cannot run any diagnostic or repair tools on system level. It hangs even the system repair etc.

BIOS is detecting the drive and shows it's correct volume.

I am pretty sure the disc received no physical damage - no clicking noises, it runs smoothly, doesn't overheat. I haven't dropped nor shaken it in any way.

What can I do with it? Should I purchase SATA-to-USB external enclosure, hoping it will work so I can repair or just extract the data? I have no other ideas.

EDIT: I found similarities to this question. Even the HDD model matches. How can I contact the autor, given I cannot add comments without reputation?

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NoMercyIncluded
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1 Answers1

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Do not try to use Tool running on Windows, try low-level tools such as MHDD32. YOu can find a bunch of Diagnosis tools bundled as Ultimate Boot CD here http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Boot from this CD and select MHDD32 and let it scan your hard drive. Before you do that unplug all other drives.

If you are going to scan and repair your drive be warned that this could (depending on the size and damage) take several hours or days to complete.

Start with inspecting the SMART Data if you see any errors there then go on to do a quick scan and if that worked do a full scan and repair bad sectors. The last scan will propably take several days to complete.

Steven
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  • Thank you! I was told there are low-level solutions, but somehow I didn't try them yet. Will do it tomorrow and report here! – NoMercyIncluded Jan 13 '17 at 04:07
  • Okay, I tried Ultimate Boot CD, but was a bit afraid of running MHDD32 and wanted to run some diagnostic first. Used Parted Magic, with TestDisk and other tools I found out that partitions are recoverable, just read errors due to bad sectors, but situation doesn't seem critical. Now, tomorrow I will buy another HDD so I can clone the contents and then run MHDD32 on the damaged disk. Should I restore partition table via TestDisk before cloning? It detects partitions and filesystem, just the table seems to be off so other tools see it as unallocated space. – NoMercyIncluded Jan 14 '17 at 01:07
  • Well, I was forced to read about MHDD32 and similar tools to avoid data loss and thanks to that I understood mechanic. I tried restoring partition table with fdisk and gdisk (to remove GPT/MBR mismatch), then copied two out of three partitions which were accessible. Then I ran MHDD32 scan which found ~290 UNC sectors, other than that the disc was in a pretty good shape. I was then able to copy some data from the 3rd partition, but not to make full copy of it. I ran another MHDD32 scan, now with remap on and right now I am doing full copy of the last partition. Thank you @Steven! – NoMercyIncluded Jan 17 '17 at 12:11