cgsecurity.org

Hi,

My Maxtor external hard drive spontaneously decided to stop working the other day. It was plugged in and as I was downloading data on it, it suddenly made a weird noise and now it won't mount on my Mac. It was formatted as an NTFS drive and I use Paragon.

When I plug it in, the blue light never turns on. Two distinctive beeps are heard and then the drive spins for awhile and stops. Then a few minutes later, a "Seagate Expension" hard drive is detected (my guess it's the drive within the enclosure, right?) but I'm asked to initialise it and I don't want to format this drive because my recent work is in it. Also, it is listed as a 144,12 PB capacity drive (?). Tried a different cable and on Windows computer with similar results (Disk Management lists the same crazy capacity, says it's unallocated and ask to initialize the hard drive when I click on it)

I launched Testdisk because it saved me from a much worse situation before and it detects a drive with that same capacity ( Disk /dev/rdisk2 - 144115 TB / 131071 TiB) . When I launch an analysis, after a day, it was still at 0% and then I read that the disk capacity needs to be correct in order for Testdisk to work so I'm at an impasse and I don't know what to do.

I never dropped this hard drive or unplugged it while used, so I'm hoping it's a Sata connection issue as opposed to physical failure issue. Seagate support didn't help at all and only gave me boilerplate answers to this very specific issue. Part of me wants to open the enclosure and buy a SATA connector to see if that would help but since I never tried that before, I rather ask much more knowledgeable and experienced people before I do anything that I will regret.

Thank you in advance.

First if there is a SATA connector on your disk. Some external disks (Western Digital mostly) do not have one.
If there is a SATA connector, turn your computer off and plug the disk inside your computer (assuming it's not a laptop), otherwise, yes, you will have to buy an HDD enclosure.
If it doesn't work, you will have to contact a data recovery company.

Thanks for the answer, cgrenier.

Judging from this disassembly video of the same hard drive, I think there is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HakoHteqxDU
Isn't it the part that gets disconnected around the 1 minute mark?

Would a SATA to USB connector work as opposed to a new enclosure? I'm using a laptop.

Also, judging by my description, does it seem like disk controller failure or a physical drive damage? What are the main reasons why Testdisk would misread the disk capacity by this much? I didn't understand the instructions regarding the HD Jumper and BIOS to correct this issue.

Thank you again.

Sorry for the double post but I have an update.

So I decided to bite the bullet and open the drive up. Used a Sata connector and the result is the same, except now, the drive makes more beeps as it spins.
So I guess it might be a physical issue after all.

The drive is still detected as Seagate Expension with petabites of data. I noticed something though:


The sector size is listed as 4096. And I have an identical hardrive, formatted the same way and with same capacity and it's sector size is 512.

So the question I have left is: should I change the disk sector size (labeled "VERY DANGEROUS" so I'm really not confident) or if I should open the hard drive in a clean air enclosure and see if the head is stuck on the plate and roll it out the way just to be able to recover the few recent work files I created?

Thanks in advance.

You should contact a data recovery company. It's dangerous to open an hard disk outside a cleanroom or a laminar flow chamber.

Opened it inside a vacuumed sealed box and found out that there was a thin dark ring around the platter. So that's a dead hard drive as far as I'm concerned. Don't know how this happened after a couple of month of light use and no bumps but I guess that's my luck. Going to send it to a new acquaintance that works at a data recovery center for a diagnosis, with no hope whatsoever.

Thanks for the help.