Save hard drive data questions....

[Richard]

I have a Thermaltake "BlacX" thingy that is plugged into back of PC. I have a 3 TB hard drive in it. This has been my backup in case PC died. Well.....pc died. Meanwhile, wife rescued a 22 pound cat. Cat happened to walk beside desk, tangled his belly in the wires, pulled the Thermaltake off the desk, crashed to floor and now, my 3 TB disk might not be long for this world. (might have already left)

Going into PC, I started to copy files (old family pictures) over to a brand new 4 TB SSD external drive. Came home from work, many files moved but needed to hit enter to finish something, did so, screen cleared. I still have tons of stuff on 3TB drive.

Go into disk Management, 3TB shows "unknown", 2048 unallocated, not initialized. Right click to initialize, bullet is on "GPT", hit OK (also did this same with MBR selected. In both cases, get "Data error (cyclic redundancy check) error.

tried to run checkdsk but, no drive letter so can't mount the drive (unless I'm missing something)
Went on to run SFC / Scannow and again, though it worked, it wasn't working on the missing drive as best I can tell.

While in Disk Management, the disk has what appears to be a red circle with a + in it, reminds me of the Red Cross. Click Properties, "This device is working properly". Volumes: Disk 2, type unkonwn, status, not initialized. Volumes and capacity (bottom) are blank.

That's quick snapshot of where I am and what I've done. I have scanned photos (spent WEEKS and WEEKS scanning old photos from the late 1950's through today....)

I'm open to any ideas on how to retrieve.... I've stumbled onto some programs that say they can recover data even after formatting disk. (My understanding is when you reformat, it simply erases the first character in the name (or something), which then tells the system that space is usable.) I don't know how accurate that is but I've done anything yet.

Oh, turn the Thermaltake off/on, you can hear the disk spool up. Unplug the USB plug and it will beep when it's plugged back in, so to me, that suggests the computer "sees" something.

Any thoughts/help is appreciated!

 

[nikdfish]

In the distant past, I had good luck with a rutime software product "GetDataBack". (https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm)
If you don't find a fix out there you may want to take a look at it.

They have a "try before you buy" policy. You do a free download, run it on your problem disk and see if it can find what you need during a "preview" of recoverable data. If things look good, you can buy a license, apply it to the running program and then save the recovered data to a new location. No need to do another scan first. It is not cheap, the current license price is $79, but it is a lifetime license with free updates.

If you are going to try the data recovery route, do as little with the bad drive as you possible. Any changes made on the drive can reduce the likelihood of successful recovery.

 

[John0829]

This is why a long time ago I stopped using only one drive for backup, I now use 2. Plus, clone all data to an old laptop though my network and critical data is also archived to a network drive. Yeah, over kill I know but drives fail, folks do not realize they only are good for so many read, write cycles and this includes flash devices and many of the new super fast hard drives.

Do as little as possible to the drive, last time, a long time ago, when I still used WinDoze and had a failure like this all my attempts to recover it only ended up corrupting the drive further. Naturally that caused almost all the data to be lost. I suggest finding someone with a Linux machine to see if it can read the data, that is what worked for me.

 

[jyoutz]

Bite the bullet and take both drives into a computer repair shop. They have many more tools and toys than is prudent for most of us to buy. I recently took a computer to a shop when the Windows 11 upgrade failed “ because my computer specs weren’t suitable for upgrading.” They successfully installed the new operating system.

 

[Tpondel]

For the future, consider cloud backup. Any day I turn on my PC it auto connects to the cloud and backs up recent files.

Been using one firm for years. Safe and convenient. When I replaced the PC took a few hours and everything on the old moved to the new. Even the file and app locations were identical.

 

[JasperFrank]

I never liked the Thermaltake "BlacX" Drive Bays. Shut down computer.
Just unplug the thermaltake and install the 3tb HD directly to your PC. Any unused SATA port and power lead should work. You may have to go into the BIOS to turn on the port.
Start the computer back up and it should see the drive an assign a device id. Then check drive status. Settings > System > Storage > Advanced storage settings > Disks & volumes
Health Status.
If you get a good. Go back and see if you can find the files you are looking for. If you get an error, I would suggest taking the drive to a shop. Cause drive recover can get very complicated to describe all the steps and tools used. A good shop will have all those tools to work with.
A quick format can always be recovered if you have not written anything new. It just opens the sectors for re-write. A full format is not recoverable. Since its not using the old headers, its establishing new ones for the R/W heads. So the old data has been zeroed out.

I would suspect the Thermalake as the issue. Not the HD. The first thing a shop will do is image the entire drive. Using Clonezilla. Then look at this clone. If that didn't work then use something like Recuva on the original. But a good shop will call for permission to do this, on the original drive. Cause the first rule, is you don't mess with the original, unless it is entirely needed. AFTER they have an image, of the original. You haven't told us what your PC was or replacement PC and OS is. And this matters, if you want to DIY this.

 

[drssg]

If I'm understanding correctly, the work you have been doing is focused on retrieving data from your backup storage device. Depending on the nature of the PC problem, the PC hard drive might still be OK.

I purchased a fairly inexpensive device that allows you to connect a hard drive to it and then plug it into a USB port to view the data. That would involve opening up the PC to remove the hard drive.

If you don't feel like doing all that, I also think it wouldn't be that expensive to just take the PC into a PC shop.