Dead portable drive?

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semigeek

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#265569 28-Jan-2020 13:45

Last night my neighbour brought over a 2TB drive which he couldn't access. I asked him if he has been using the Safely Remove Hardware feature of Windows and he said no, he had just been pulling the cable out of the USB port. Anyway, plugging the drive into my computer, it shows up in Minitool Partition Pro as Bad Disk and 1863.0GB. Options like Rebuild MBR are non existent when the drive is selected. In Disk Management, it asks to initialise the drive, but choosing the MBR option gives a data error (cyclic redundancy check). Is the drive dead, or is there anything else I can do? There are no options to reformat etc when using Minitool either.

Dratsab

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#2408236 28-Jan-2020 14:39

Are you able to use Minitool to do a surface test so it can find and mark bad sectors?

semigeek

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#2408251 28-Jan-2020 14:56

Dratsab: Are you able to use Minitool to do a surface test so it can find and mark bad sectors?

Nope, I think the disk might be a goner.

surfisup1000

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#2408272 28-Jan-2020 15:36

Could try using something like getdataback, or easeus recovery.

Although, these tools are unlikely to recover too much data... as is my experience with disk hardware errors.

Just tell your neighbour to buy a new drive and restore from their backup drive -- I'm kidding, of course.

tripper1000

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#2408274 28-Jan-2020 15:39

Is it even spinning up? If it looses power without safe-removal the heads can get stuck out in the middle of disk prevent it spinning up. If so, and if you're lucky, it can be as simple as a edgewise thump to get it going. Youtube vid.

semigeek

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#2409725 29-Jan-2020 14:42

tripper1000:

Is it even spinning up? If it looses power without safe-removal the heads can get stuck out in the middle of disk prevent it spinning up. If so, and if you're lucky, it can be as simple as a edgewise thump to get it going. Youtube vid.

It didn't sound like it was.. anyway, gave it back to the neighbour.

ANglEAUT

altered-ego
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#2409805 29-Jan-2020 18:25

semigeek: ... I asked him if he has been using the Safely Remove Hardware feature of Windows ...

Have you tried a different USB enclosure? It could be that the housing itself is dead, but not the drive itself.

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Lias

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#2411285 1-Feb-2020 21:57

If they care about the data, take it to the professionals. e.g. Data Lab

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