Crashed external USB hard drive - sole solution

dj11k

Since I have spent a month trying to recover data on this drive, I felt my experience would be worth sharing.
I was copying all the data from my computer's hard drive, so that I could reinstall Windows 7, which I do every month or two. Power went out. That has happened before, but it never zapped the drive. Of course, I had neither a battery in the computer, nor had it plugged into a UPS (something that will NEVER happen again).
The drive was afterwords recognized to the extent you could eject it, but nothing else. Hoping the drive itself might work, I tore open the drive case (had to use a hacksaw) and hooked it up to a USB connector. You could still eject it, but nothing else.
I had a drive die several years ago (not from the power going out, it just stopped working for some unknown reason) and was able to recover it with EASEUS, so I first tried several versions of it, including the newest and the one that worked before. It recovered 300GB of the ~4TB I knew to be on the drive.
Subsequently, I went through EVERY SINGLE recovery program I could find on sanet and elsewhere.
Bottom line, the only one that worked was Seagate File Recovery Suite 3.2.6 Technician. It literally took a week 24/7 (the first 93% was only a few hours, then about 1% per day), but it did get back the 4TB of data.
I hope someone can learn from this experience.

abluesboy

dj11k Seagate File Recovery Suite 3.2.6 Technician.

Seagate File Recovery Suite 3.2.6 Technician

https://sanet.st/blogs/mordigian/seagate_file_recovery_suite_technician_multilingual.2924669.html

be shoving that on a usb and tossing it in a drawer ....

karolus

dj11k
See also:

https://www.ghacks.net/2020/02/14/seagate-premium-file-recovery/
https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/services-software/seagate-recovery-services/recovery-software/_shared/masters/PRS-NPrem8-Win-x86-w11b-3.7.0.0.msi

robbbbert

Glad your persistence paid off.
Good of you to take the time to share this.

Personally, I use two USB external drives.
They contain all my files plus the OS back ups.
They are duplicates of each other.

One drive is always kept off unless it is actually being used.
This protects against drive failure, power outage or virus attack.

teejaydee

You must have been very relieved to find a recovery program (Seagate File Recovery Suite 3.2.6 Technician) that was successful.

May I please ask if the hard drive was a Seagate, and if so, whether you feel the matching of Seagate hardware and software contributed to your success.

dj11k

teejaydee It was a Seagate. However, there is a strong possibility that at least the file recovery portion of the program will work with other brands. I certainly hope I never need to find out for sure, though!
I did not notice anything in using the program that seemed to indicate it was aware it was recovering a Seagate drive.

teejaydee

dj11k Thank you for this additional information. I suppose anyone trying to recover data from a hard drive will try anything and everything! I do not currently have a need to recover data, but I shall take note of your good results with the Seagate software. Thank you for taking the trouble to share your experience.

CrazyCatGuy

Just saw this, and if any older threads should be resurrected, these are the ones! Thanks for the link abluesboy : queued in JDownloader ASAP. I have several Seagate drives.

dj11k
I personally think EASEUS software sucks ass--never gotten complete recovery with it.

My experience with pre-packaged external USB drives has been dismal, with the exception of an 8TB external "XBOX" drive I got for $279 several years ago (it works fine with computers). It has the baddest front USB ports, and yeah, it's not the fastest, but it chugs along great!

EVERY failed pre-packaged external USB drive that has failed for me or someone else has been a WD...and it is always the "Click-of-Death." In 2007, I lost some professional licensing files that literally made me throw up. Luckily, I had 90% of the info backed up on another drive.

Regarding the Seagate Recovery software, I had a Seagate fail, but it wouldn't even power-up. Makes me wonder if I could have gotten it to cycle, if the software would have worked? Wish I would have taken the time to get the Seagate Recovery software....

My recovery software of choice is R-Studio, which I've used with 100% success since the software first came out long ago--if the drive can be read by Windows, R-Studio has worked.
https://sanet.st/blogs/hotsoftwarev2/r_studio_build_network_technician_multilingual.3515931.html
or another of their versions.

Back to WD drives, the only WD drives I use are the Purple Surveillance drives in my (3) NAS boxes or as homebrew external USB drives...but therein lies a story with R-Studio...

I had an old QNAP that I used for about 8-10 years, and over time, put in some WD Purple Surveillance drives. I almost exclusively use RAID 1 other than one NAS that is my downloads and miscellaneous files running RAID 5. RAID 1, 5, whatever is great...until the actual internal NAS controller fails.

What happened would make a techie piss their trousers. When the controller failed on the first drive on the QSNAP with RAID 1, the second drive continued to run and most of the data was overwritten with garbage (like a Wipe). I was not amused--much crying ensued, because the first drive got hosed also.

The only way I was able to recover about 95% of the data was using R-Studio with the first RAID 1 drive in a USB docker. It took about a 3-4 days, running 24/7 to recover 4GB of data. The WD Purple Surveillance drive got toasty, but worked great, and I still have it.

Yeah, yeah...long story, but hey! I like stories! :)

Angulio

CrazyCatGuy I only use WD Black here both USB and HDD. Never had a crash with those for almost 7 years now

meispisces

I had same issue 2 weeks before where my Seagate 2 TB external hard drive had stopped responding due to several bad sectors and then I had to formatted it. I used every bit of external recovery software such as EaseUS, Stellar Data Recovery and what not but till date my professional data recovery service was able to recover only 50% of data (approx 800 GB of 1.7 TB). Does the Seagate Technician Software will be useful in recovering the entire hard disk?

mindblah

I'm curious about something:

I was copying all the data from my computer's hard drive, so that I could reinstall Windows 7, which I do every month or two.

Why do you reinstall Windows 7 every month or two? (I'm not a Windows user btw; just wondering.)

dj11k

mindblah First, the reason why I use W7: W10 is a step further into turning a computer into a black box, like Apple. Furthermore, I rely on several programs that were made for XP and stopped working after W7.
Second, W7 starts slowing down after a month or two. Running programs like registry cleaners, etc. makes me nervous. Hence, a clean install. But since W7 support ceased in Jan 2020, I have taken to simply "restoring" a clean install, since the end result after all the updates is gonna be almost identical.

abluesboy

mindblah Why do you reinstall Windows

It's got a known half life .......

grows like a pig on corn .

there's a noticeable difference with a clean install.

dj11k

mindblah I guess the analogy to a new car sort of fits with reinstalling Windows. I won't mention a word that starts with "v" and ends with "irgin"...
Another bit of trivia: back in the "good old days" when SSDs first came out and a 64GB SSD cost US$1,000 I bought one and installed Windows XP on it. My computer booted in 15 seconds and I was BLOWN AWAY! However, after installing all the Windows updates it took over 2 minutes to boot up...

fogjuice

Thanks for the info.

I have a WD Elements external USB hard drive that appears to be on it's last legs. I'm currently using the command line utility 'ddrescue' in Linux to recover as much data as possible. If that doesn't work, I will give the Seagate recovery tools a try.