PC hard drive - anyone help?

adivvunknaa

Central Defender
Got a PC with a Seagate Barracuda 2TB internal hdd.

Cut a long story short, the PC wouldn't boot up all of a sudden...got in using Windows PE and tried everything under the sun using cmd prompt...the hdd couldn't be found so no recovery / reboot software would work from a usb drive etc.

Removed the hdd and put it into an external usb hdd caddy and connected to my laptop. Now the hdd appears in three sections:
(1) System Reserved (NTFS) (Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition) 100mb
(2) RAW (Healthy (Primary Partition) 1862.09gb
(3) Healthy (Recovery Partition) 845mb

So now I should be able to run disk checkers, recovery tools etc - however, section (2) only stays connected for, say 30s, and then disappears. It will only reappear if I turn off the external caddy and turn it back on again. Because it disappears after a short time, all the checker and recovery software suddenly times out cos the drive they're checking has disappeared!

Anyone help? I've made sure the usb isn't powering down or anything like that, and sometimes the hdd will stay connected longer if something is trying to check it - but never for longer than a few mins.
 


Got a PC with a Seagate Barracuda 2TB internal hdd.

Cut a long story short, the PC wouldn't boot up all of a sudden...got in using Windows PE and tried everything under the sun using cmd prompt...the hdd couldn't be found so no recovery / reboot software would work from a usb drive etc.

Removed the hdd and put it into an external usb hdd caddy and connected to my laptop. Now the hdd appears in three sections:
(1) System Reserved (NTFS) (Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition) 100mb
(2) RAW (Healthy (Primary Partition) 1862.09gb
(3) Healthy (Recovery Partition) 845mb

So now I should be able to run disk checkers, recovery tools etc - however, section (2) only stays connected for, say 30s, and then disappears. It will only reappear if I turn off the external caddy and turn it back on again. Because it disappears after a short time, all the checker and recovery software suddenly times out cos the drive they're checking has disappeared!

Anyone help? I've made sure the usb isn't powering down or anything like that, and sometimes the hdd will stay connected longer if something is trying to check it - but never for longer than a few mins.

Any joy with Seatools ?

SeaTools | Seagate Support Deutschland

Anything on it that you want to keep or ok to "flatten" it if you have to ?
 
Sounds like a fault on the drive motherboard. Sling it and start again is my best advice.

If you don’t have backups of your data, try getting it off bit by bit. If you are really stuck then you will either have to send it away or see if you can pick up another drive of the same model (eBay), and swap the motherboards. That might work as a long term solution too.
 
Sounds like a fault on the drive motherboard. Sling it and start again is my best advice.

If you don’t have backups of your data, try getting it off bit by bit. If you are really stuck then you will either have to send it away or see if you can pick up another drive of the same model (eBay), and swap the motherboards. That might work as a long term solution too.

this, I wouldn't be trusting it. I hope you have a backup if there is anything important on it.
 
What can also fix it is running seatools.

Try a different USB to sata adapter as they aren't always reliable

Buy a new hdd and install Windows on it, use the faulty drive as a secondary see if you get the data off it that way.

Use disk management to delete all partitions, create 1 new partition and then use easus data recovery to recover all the data. Sounds daft but I had to do this to my broken nas drive which did a similar

Don't bother trying to swap the board on it as they all have different firmware revisions and it's virtually impossible to match them uo
 
Any joy with Seatools ?

SeaTools | Seagate Support Deutschland

Anything on it that you want to keep or ok to "flatten" it if you have to ?
No tried that and no joy.

Unfortunately a certain family member has stored her entire life on this drive so trying to recover it :evil:
Have you tried turning it off and then turning it on again?
Yeah I have to, as the drive appears then disappears again.
What can also fix it is running seatools.

Try a different USB to sata adapter as they aren't always reliable

Buy a new hdd and install Windows on it, use the faulty drive as a secondary see if you get the data off it that way.

Use disk management to delete all partitions, create 1 new partition and then use easus data recovery to recover all the data. Sounds daft but I had to do this to my broken nas drive which did a similar

Don't bother trying to swap the board on it as they all have different firmware revisions and it's virtually impossible to match them uo
I've ordered another caddy in case it's the caddy at fault, so will try that tomorrow.

I've tried running easeus already, but the drive disappears while easeus is running so I can't get it to stay visible long enough to scan / recover etc
 
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A general tip for anyone is to make sure you do backups. Hard disks fail, things get deleted by accident and there are things like ransomware around. A friend of mine if a photographer and lost years worth of stuff to ransomware because she didn't want to spend £50 on an external disk.

Set a date, put a reminder on your phone. Every month, back up to an external disk. If you want to be a bit more paranoid, keep that external disk at work or a friend/family house.

There are online backups, they can be quite expensive but if everything you have will fit into a dropbox/onedrive account, go for that.

I've known people who run their own business and their entire work is on one PC with no backup. It is amazing to see it dawn on them when you say "right, what would you do if that hard disk broke or the computer was stolen". Almost always lose weeks/months of wages, for 5 minutes of effort per month.
 
A general tip for anyone is to make sure you do backups. Hard disks fail, things get deleted by accident and there are things like ransomware around. A friend of mine if a photographer and lost years worth of stuff to ransomware because she didn't want to spend £50 on an external disk.

Set a date, put a reminder on your phone. Every month, back up to an external disk. If you want to be a bit more paranoid, keep that external disk at work or a friend/family house.

There are online backups, they can be quite expensive but if everything you have will fit into a dropbox/onedrive account, go for that.

I've known people who run their own business and their entire work is on one PC with no backup. It is amazing to see it dawn on them when you say "right, what would you do if that hard disk broke or the computer was stolen". Almost always lose weeks/months of wages, for 5 minutes of effort per month.

I use onedrive, because I get it through work, to backup all my photos. I've had a hard drive with photos on go bad in the past, and I know i'd forget to do a backup regarully. It's just easier to put them on there and it has the added benefit of being accessible on my other devices.
 
I use onedrive, because I get it through work, to backup all my photos. I've had a hard drive with photos on go bad in the past, and I know i'd forget to do a backup regarully. It's just easier to put them on there and it has the added benefit of being accessible on my other devices.
I've been looking at that. The standard dropbox is too small for my photos but that may be a sign of a lot of crap in there! I've got onedrive from work too, but didn't want to use that because it might cause hassle if I leave and have to frantically get the data off.
 
I've been looking at that. The standard dropbox is too small for my photos but that may be a sign of a lot of crap in there! I've got onedrive from work too, but didn't want to use that because it might cause hassle if I leave and have to frantically get the data off.

It's not really an issue. I primarily store photos on a hard drive at home, so all i do is put the onedrive client on and set it to be on that drive. I then set the photos folder to always keep an copy, even if my account was instantly cancelled, there is already a copy of the files on that hard drive. I have 5TB of space on onedrive, and it's the only thing on a 3TB hard drive, but I don't think I'm using more than 1TB. It's nice for the peace of mind.
 
It's not really an issue. I primarily store photos on a hard drive at home, so all i do is put the onedrive client on and set it to be on that drive. I then set the photos folder to always keep an copy, even if my account was instantly cancelled, there is already a copy of the files on that hard drive. I have 5TB of space on onedrive, and it's the only thing on a 3TB hard drive, but I don't think I'm using more than 1TB. It's nice for the peace of mind.
That does sound a bit better than the 15gb or whatever the default is with dropbox!
 
If the HD is healthy and it;s simply not booting, it may just be a knackered CMOS battery on the MB. Might be best to change that first before dicking about with everything else. Then go to BIOS and set all the date settings correctly, PCs can have a right issue with dodgy dates.
 

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