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HDD Messed Up. But Shows Up w Letter In Disk Mgmt

Posted: 14 Feb 2018, 19:16
by sja2412
Hi, my external USB HDD (2GB Seagate) was working fine and just started having issues. I've tried a different cable, different USB port, different computers, etc.

HDD works *very* briefly in Windows -- for a few seconds -- when it's first plugged in and then stops. If I'm very quick, I can possibly open a sub-directory from G:\ in cmd, but then everything else will stop.

However, the HDD is still spinning the entire time and appears to be "on" -- even when it's not working in windows.

Though, the HDD always shows up in My Computer (windows 7). But when I click on the HDD, I just get an hourglass and windows explorer says not responding.

The HDD shows up under Disk Management as formatted NTFS and has a drive letter assigned (G). It also shows the accurate amount of total/free space.

I've done a lot of research, and saw that people recommended trying to assign a different letter. When I try to assign a new letter, Disk Management just stalls/hangs.

I've downloaded various programs to try to recover the data (including Disk Drill), and it doesn't seem to even begin scanning for files.

I also downloaded HDDScan. It won't even let me generate SMART data for the HD.

I've been playing around with TestDisk. When I use the Intel drive function, it doesn't find any partitions. I get "Partition: Read error."

Any ideas on how to proceed? Thank you very much.

Re: HDD Messed Up. But Shows Up w Letter In Disk Mgmt

Posted: 15 Feb 2018, 07:02
by cgrenier
Try to clone the disk to a new empty one using ddrescue.
Read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf there are a chapter about creating a Linux LIve USB and another about ddrescue usage.