I 've got a 4TB HDD that 's giving me a bad CRC error in Win7, and Windows keeps wanting to for...

[G+_Rich Fowler]

I've got a 4TB HDD that's giving me a bad CRC error in Win7, and Windows keeps wanting to format it. When I try to run CHKDSK /F, it tells me the disk is in RAW format, and can't be operated on until I format it. (Yay.) I popped in SpinRite 6, and then realized it won't work on this drive, because it's 4TB and only shows up as 2TB in SR.

 

So what other programs would you guys recommend to fix this? It's mostly old video and audio files, nothing critical, but I'd rather not lose the data if it's salvageable.

[G+_Terry Henderson]

Rich Fowler Exactly Why I Won't Buy A HDD Bigger Than 2 TB, See If The HDD Mfg. Offers A Diagnostic Tool !!!

[G+_Rich Fowler]

The problem may have resolved itself (and not in a good way). It's no longer showing up at all in Disk Management, so it very well may be toast. The other bulk storage HDD was making suspicious whirring sounds, so I'm making sure to back that up completely. Wish I had been a little more on the ball on that other drive.

 

I can't remember for sure, but I think they were WD Green drives, so they may have head-parked themselves to death, which is an annoying "feature" of these power management drives. I wish I had known about WDIDLE3 before today!

[G+_Rich Fowler]

AH! I spoke too soon! Re-assigning the backup drive to another drive letter (X:), removing it and rebooting brought back my munged drive. I checked the SMART data with SANDRA, and it looks like it's not terribly messed up physically, but it has some bad blocks in the MBR area (or whatever they call it now.) (Wow, 900 days of power on time.)

 

Recuva didn't work, so now I'm trying Lazesoft's Data Recovery Home version, which is free, too. It found one partition, which is good, because there was only one partition to begin with.

[G+_Rich Fowler]

I let Lazesoft run overnight, and it's managed to recover some files, but not others.

 

It found jpgs and not gifs or tiffs, it found avis and not mkvs, doc files but not txt files, zip but not rar files. THAT is annoying, because I know I had different formats of files on that HDD.

 

But it DID find some critical stuff I would not have liked to lose! So points for that.

 

I'm saving what I can on to another HDD, and then I suppose I'll find another program to try to get the unpopular file formats off.

[G+_Rich Fowler]

Now that Lazesoft is almost done, I'm going to run Testdisk on this drive, and see what I get. It's probably what I should have done in the first place, because it supports a lot more formats (around 440 compared to 10 or so.) And it's FOSS.

[G+_Jason Marsh]

If it's a backup drive, then why not just presume you have all the data that's backed-up to it and DBAN that bad boy and start fresh?

 

Or, do you mean something else by backup drive?

[G+_Rich Fowler]

Unfortunately, it wasn't a backup drive.

 

The original messed up drive was at F:\. The backup drive was backing up another drive at E:\ that started failing (both have around 900 days of uptime according to SMART.) And because the backup drive took over F:\, for some reason Windows wouldn't let me see the messed up drive F:\.

 

After I safely backed up E:\, I went to the backup drive now occupying F:\, reassigned it to X:\ to get it out of the way of the messed up drive, then I removed it (it's a USB drive). When I rebooted, I could see the failed F:\ drive again. (This made me happy.)

 

And that's what I've been recovering since last night. Lazesoft got a lot of stuff out of it, but it's not great. I'm going to try Testdisk next, because it seems pretty robust.

[G+_Rich Fowler]

If you're gonna use Testdisk, DON'T create a log file. Every time it hits an error, it'll log it. In my case, over 18 hours it created a 166GB log file, truncated because the disk was full.

 

Doh.

 

I'm going to remove the trashed drive and let it Testdisk cook it on an old test bench box I use for breaking or fixing things.

[G+_Rich Fowler]

SUCCESS! With the AltLinux Rescue Disk running Testdisk 6.14.

 

http://en.altlinux.org/Rescue

 

I booted it, chose the Live CD, chose the Forensic Mode, typed Testdisk at the Command Line, selected Intel for HDD type, and it rebuilt the MBR in a minute. (A little oversimplified, but that's basically it.)

 

This version has the latest update of the 6.14 version of Testdisk, which supports large hard drives (over 2TB). The WIP version you'll find on Hiren's Boot CD does not. (So don't use it!)

 

This has been an educational experience in a lot of ways! (lol)