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I had a major hard drive failure four years ago when both my main hard drive and my backup drive failed. I used a piece of software called EaseUS to recover about 90-95% of my files so you may want to give it a try. Here is the link
https://www.easeus.com/
Good luck.
well, after fiddling with a lot, I unplugged my system, reseated power, and it came up seeing the drive.I had tried that quite a few times before it took off again. I immediatly started coying files to my exrternal. I'm nearly complete, doing the last huge folder that will take hours, but I've succeeded so far.
The only strange thing, I had saved my email previously to the failed drive, and for some reason, i cannot copy these to the external drive. I can see them in my email program and they are good. Saved as .eml files.
I GOT REALLY LUCKY HERE, THAT'S FOR SURE. A BACKUP SCHEDULE IS IN THE WORKS AS SOON AS THIS COPYING GETS COMPLETED. ALSO SIGNING UP FOR CLOUD STORAGE. SO IT WILL BE AT LEAST 2 EXTERNALS, AND A CLOUD. HOPEFULLY THAT WILL WORK. I'm going to save this external as potential backup, and install the new one which will be set up for auto backup.
One thing that helped me out in a pinch with a wonky drive was a Linux (Ubuntu or other distro) boot CD. Once I booted from CD, Linux was actually able to "see" my drive. I managed to copy everything from the wonky drive over to a portable backup HD. I then re-installed the content on a fresh HD like nothing ever happened.
great news Daveso
What happens? Your problem might be bad sectors, and if your email files are stored in the area that has bad sectors the drive will get very slow when trying to read these.
If the drive is still accessible you could check SMART data to see what may be wrong. A small number of bad sectors will normally be recovered by the drive using space sectors and it may work fine for a long time afterwards, but if they are causing the drive to malfunction there are usually so many that the process will accellerate and the drive will die quickly.
HDD Sentinel can diagnose your drives and provides very detailed info about their health and their SMART data, you could download the trial version to check your drive.
https://www.hdsentinel.com
Smart move. Am really happy you are able to get it working and able to save everything. Definitely learn from this and always backup everything at least on a weekly bases. I do all my files twice a week at least. I use the combo of external, thumb, dropbox, icloud, google drive and one drive.
...had a fatal drive crash a couple years ago take years of work with it. Still in the process of rebuilding characters (and they never quite come out the same). Now have a 4 TB external backup partitioned for both drives.
If you have irreplaceable data like family photos it might be worth it. Otherwise I would just forget about it. Over the the years I lost more than 15 TB of stuff because of failed drives. Most stuff is replaceable so don't sweat it too much. For the irreplaceable stuff unfortunately there's no real safe solution because you can never predict which and when your harddrive is going to fail. Any harddrive older than 2 years will fail out of the blue. It might be a within a week or it might be another 2 years, you never know. My solution is to have a back-up of the important stuff on all my drives just in case.
Also a piece of advice: NEVER EVER defrag your harddrive. EVER. Don't mind what people say on IT tech forums. I'm speaking from experience. Defragging will at best lower the life expentacy of your drive and at worse kill it.
Depends on which drives one uses, the drives from the manufacturer I have chosen have had just 2 failed drives during the last quarter of a century and one them was my own fault for not cleaning the dust off of the underside where my homemade windtunnel was collecting it and the other one was externally powered external drive that started having voltage level issues on the USB, the drive itself may still be fully functional.
As I have been responsible for all things computer in my previous jobs, together with my home rigs, I'm talking about at least 100++ drives
Usually the capacity of the drive gets too small compared to new ones way before the drive fails
Probably too late but on Mac I had quite good results with the Software "Disk Drill" (Windows version available as well)
Even a drive that did no longer mount correctly and was not seen in finder or disc utility I would connect to and recover a fair amount of content. Not everything and a lot only in form or orphans without proper directory structure but better than nothing.
You might check it out here: https://www.cleverfiles.com/
I had some drive tables get corrupted AND a dubiously connected external drive reader go belly up on me which made my drives(s) unreadable.
My solution was
1) On the "bad drive", I found the PCB number... like G0044E
2) Searched online for a vendor who had that PCB in stock... usually $25-50... You can try ebay as well.
3) When you get the "new" PCB, you "could" just screw it on to your old drive, however, it won't see any of the previous data. So what you have to do, to recognize your lost data is migrate the bios chips on the "old/lost" PCB to the "new" PCB...
4) My soldering skills were not up to the task, so for $20 I went to a cell phone repair shop and had them do it.
5) Screw new PCB onto old hard drive
WIN!
If its a mechanical drive, you haven't lost anything and should be able to recover most(if not all) of your data. I don't know what the going price is per Mb or Gb, but it use to cost an arm & leg. It should be much cheaper nowadays, depending on how much data needs to be retrieved. However, if its an SSD, you might be screwed.
its mechanical. I think i have gotten most off once it resurrected itself. I was going to buy SSD, but mechaincal drives are dirt cheap right now and bought a seagate. it goes in today.
Seagate is the one I trust when it comes to HD's, with the exeption of external ones with their own power source.
I think all the drives are dirt cheap at the moment, I was just looking at the prices for M2 drives and 2TB Kingstons were around 190-200eur including 24% VAT. I think last autumn that was the price for 1TB Kingston SSD or two 4TB external Seagate HD's
I'll second this. I've used their software to recover the data off of several ""failed" drives and off of reformatted drives. As long as your drive spins up, it's very likely it will recover your data, even if the OS doesn't recognize the drive. It sounds like you have either some corrupt data, or a corrupt file allocation table. If the files you can copy are important, then one of their products should recover them. If you can "see" them but can't copy them, they are corrupt, easeus software will get most if not all of them, but some might be corrupt and either display oddly or not open depending on the amount of damage on the drive.
Hope you get everything back!
For what it's worth, I've been stocking up on decent (WD Black & Seagate) hard drives (i.e. spinning) drives larger than 2TB (2TB to 6TB) for both internal and external drives. I find them very nice for backup and archival purposes. They are actually quite reliable despite being unbelievably sophisticated machines with moving parts. They don't experience a lot of powered time (if they go to sleep properly) and they last for years on the shelf. And if the mechanics or the electronics fail, the data itself is still there on those platters if you can get them into another drive. And as you say, they seem to be cheap(er) now. And considering that when current stocks of mechanical storage drives dries up the prices will surely rise. But it seems that the 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB are the most economical. I don't know how much "fix" there is within an SSD. Probably need a nice set of Russian microscope & tweezers to examine the memory "cores".
And besides, who needs any more storage than a terabyte?
24TB's connected at the moment...
Seagate's are the only drives I'll buy. I still have a 1TB external that I bought in 2008 when the 1TB first came out I believe to transfer the files on a WD drive I had in my desktop that fried. The Geek Squad at Best Buy were able to get the files off of it. But, the external is still going strong. I have 4 drives in my desktop of varying sizes and all of them as Seagate's. Every single WD I've owned has fried at one point in time after being only 2 yrs old. I won't even allow a WD in the house. I swear the things are cursed. There are 6 computers in this house and none have WD in them.
I have the same experience with WD, I don't remember one that didn't die under 2 years. Seagate, 10 years no problem, even the first 7200rpm ones that you could fry bacon on (they needed additional cooling though)
I've used WD drives exclusively for over 10 years now, a total of 35-40 WD drives now I think. Some have gone bad early, that's normal for all brands. The rest have been running fine. In this PC I have 4, not a single problem with any of them or any relocated sectors. Total power on time (actual spin time) for each today, according to SMART data:
1: 2317 days, 11 hours (6.3 years) (system drive)
2: 1777 days, 17 hours (4.8 years)
3: 1648 days, 9 hours (4.5 years)
4: 1501 days, 0 hours (4.1 years)
All my drives have always been well cooled, they rarely go over 40 degrees C.
Yes, for now mechanical drives are the way to go when it comes to backing up data. The only drawback with them is they're VERY slow and it becomes time consuming when you're dealing with terabytes of data. You can use a RAID 10 array as a backup for extra redundancy & faster read/write speeds, but its still slower than SSDs. Plus you're dealing with at least 4 hard drives & added complexity + potential issues of a RAID setup.
I don't know why everybody seems to have bad experiences with WD hard drives. I've been buying PC hard drives for myself since 1998 & never had a WD drive die on me. I retired them all gracefully after many years of faithful, but ever more crowded, operation. On the other hand, I trust Seagate less, but still consider them now and then, based on sales price. However, I despise Hitachi drives & won't ever buy another one (too many bad experiences).
Although I admit, my experience with WD hard drives has mostly been with WD Black internal drives. But I have had many WD externals 4TB, 6TB, and again none of them have died.
I'm still in the market for hard drives though. They have their advantages over SSDs for some situations.
i bought a new internal, seagate barracuda... MAYBE SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN wd bLACK ... but
jUST ORDERED A sEAGATE fIRECUDA EXTERNAL. We will see how that works. supposed to be a bit faster than regualr HDD
I have to admit, I haven't touched WD with a 10ft pole in the last 15 years. When there were few in the computers I was responsible of, they could be identified by their startup sound alone, they sounded like a circular saw starting up with the heads banging against the stops.
Seagate bought WD anyway, so I imagine that they now are merging the best technologies from each company.
Yes, which is probably the case. They have more than likely become more reliable but I'm just not willing to take the chance when I have 10-25gb project folders for our packs that I work on and not willing to give a brand that I've had more than a dozen internals and externals fail on me and losing stuff that hadn't been backed up yet. One of my computers got fried due to lightning and we were in a rush to replace it so I had to buy an off the shelf and thank god there was a warranty on it because in a 6 month period 3 WD drives crapped out. That's what HP kept replacing them with. I've lost entire packs from them blowing out of nowhere. I've got more than a couple dozen hard drives in a box full of products we made and every one is a Seagate and I've never (as I knock on wood) had a single one fail. Even externals in which I have 6 of. My most popular pack that sold just a ton of and still do was one of those packs. It had to be remade 3 times. The 3 rooms and 80+ props. It took me 4 years to finally get that pack released. Since then I have not allowed another WD in this house. My son happened to buy a computer off the rack once and it had a WD in it and when I found out I ordered a Seagate and put it in it and trashed the WD. We just get custom systems now that we can pick the brand of everything that goes in it. My kids do the same. My wife had 2 WD externals at about the time mine were failing and low and behold her externals took a crap. This house must just be cured if we get one. Idk, but it was definitely maddening. There was a lot of cursing and throwing going on whenever dealing with them, lol.
@daveso If your mechanical external HDD was not making the telltale "clicking" sounds of impending doom, then it could be a bad HDD controller circuit, or bad data interface circuit, or bad power supply circuit in the external enclosure. I've had those go bad before, and simply bought a cheap $10 external case off Amazon and moved the HDD over to it, and it worked fine. I've also had external power supplies (AC adpaters) go bad too, so that is another thing to check. And, I've sometimes had luck getting a bad external drive plugged into my Windows PC to be recognized when plugged into my Mac.
TIP: Whenever I purchase a HDD or SSD, I always buy 2 identical drives and that way you can use the other one as a backup or clone of the data on the first one.
As for your email (.eml) files... You mentioned you can still see them in your email program, so you could always open them in your email app and then save their contents as a .txt file and/or email them to yourself as another form of backup. Glad to hear that you were able to get your external HDD drive working (at least temporarily) to copy off your data :)
i bought a seagate firecuda for backup. it is very very quiet. .its going to take time the 1st backup, but the great thing is it continuously backs up, so if I change a file, add, or delete, it makes the change on the backup as well. I think that should work ... other than maybe sometimes you mess up and need that file you canged or deleted. we will see..it has to be at least a lot better than no backup