[Parthasarathig]

Originally Posted by Parthasarathig

Will update if any progress is made tomorrow.

Got the adapter today from an electrical shop near my place. He charged me 250 bucks which perhaps wouldve been lesser had I gone to some market. But im happy as now the harddisk is working. Wouldve been really scary if i had to visit the svc. :(

[Thad E Ginathom]

Don't be happy until you have a copy of all that precious data on another hard disk.

Data recovery is not always possible, and can also be prohibitively expensive.

[Parthasarathig]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

Don't be happy until you have a copy of all that precious data on another hard disk.

Data recovery is not always possible, and can also be prohibitively expensive.

Yes the precious files are currently beign dropboxed for fear of such incidents in the future. :( not just expensive it can turn out to be quite a headache as audioholic has pointed out in his case.

[IronH4WK]

my wife's colleague's laptop hard drive crashed and wasn't booting (even if it did, it went straight to BSOD). she took it to the local IT and they just told her to raise a request for a new hard drive, as always! dejected, she calls some data recovery agent and i get to know of this from my wifey. i tell her to ask her friend to let me have a look before she ends up spending thousands of rupees for the recovery.

next day, the friend brings me her laptop and after a short while i figure out this thing ain't gonna boot; the hard drive was dying. i opened the laptop, took out the hard drive and connected it with USB 3.0 cable and connected it as a external drive to my laptop. i could get 95% of the data out, except for a 12GB PST file (yeah, you heard right)! no matter what i do (booting in Ubuntu and Mint 13 too) i just couldn't get the file out.

finally, i was reminded of a software that i used way back in 2003 (i think) to recover my lost files - R-Studio. downloaded the latest version of it (v6.1) and started a scan. since it was gonna take a lot of time, i got home and put the hard drive for scan overnight (yeah, it was a 500GB HDD).

next day, i check the scan and find that it was showing fragmented pieces of the 12GB file. started the time consuming recovery process and by the end of the day, i got the complete file out - in single piece

when i told the friend about this she was ecstatic! after all, i just saved her 12k!

true story

[saket77]

Originally Posted by IronH4WK

finally, i was reminded of a software that i used way back in 2003 (i think) to recover my lost files - R-Studio. downloaded the latest version of it (v6.1) and started a scan. since it was gonna take a lot of time, i got home and put the hard drive for scan overnight (yeah, it was a 500GB HDD).

Good work IronH4wk but I see that the demo version cannot recover a file with size greater than 64kb? Do you have the paid version?
I have used 'recovermyfiles' for successfully rescuing my data from a RAW file system.

[IronH4WK]

Originally Posted by saket77

Good work IronH4wk but I see that the demo version cannot recover a file with size greater than 64kb? Do you have the paid version?
I have used 'recovermyfiles' for successfully rescuing my data from a RAW file system.

yep, its a paid version

the scan will work in the demo version too, but the recovery requires a licensed version.

[nitinbose]

Hi, I have a WD 3TB external HDD which suddenly became very slow. For example to copy 100MB would take about 2-3 hours. The drive is pretty much detectable and accessible from Windows/Mac, its just the extreme slow speed that worries me.

Any suggestions?

[JMaruru]

Originally Posted by nitinbose

Hi, I have a WD 3TB external HDD which suddenly became very slow. For example to copy 100MB would take about 2-3 hours. The drive is pretty much detectable and accessible from Windows/Mac, its just the extreme slow speed that worries me.

Any suggestions?

Have you run defrag tool on this drive? If NOT, try running once.

[saket77]

Originally Posted by nitinbose

Hi, I have a WD 3TB external HDD which suddenly became very slow. For example to copy 100MB would take about 2-3 hours. The drive is pretty much detectable and accessible from Windows/Mac, its just the extreme slow speed that worries me.

Any suggestions?

If the defrag option does not work, I suggest you back up the drive and go for a clean format.

[raghu.t.k]

A bit OT, I recently built a new desktop, which would also double up as a file server to store my important photos & docs. After a lot of reading I understand that the WD has had issues recently, and seagate is better. But reading the last couple of pages, gives me jitters, since I got a seagate for this build.

Is the quality of seagate still bad ?

BTW the data is stored on a seagate which is mirrored using the MB raid functionality.

[nitinbose]

Originally Posted by JMaruru

Have you run defrag tool on this drive? If NOT, try running once.

Originally Posted by saket77

If the defrag option does not work, I suggest you back up the drive and go for a clean format.

The HDD is not fragmented. It appears the controller is faulty. The read speed is extremely slow. I had the disk evaluated at stellar and they're quoting a whopping 96K for recovery.

Any suggestions for any good data recovery agents?

[Kumar R]

Originally Posted by nitinbose

The HDD is not fragmented. It appears the controller is faulty. The read speed is extremely slow. I had the disk evaluated at stellar and they're quoting a whopping 96K for recovery.

Any suggestions for any good data recovery agents?

Yes, stellar's rates are very steep !

I can suggest three things

(1) Buy a new hard disk and simply copy all your data to the new one. Be sure to plug both old and new HDDs into a super-power PC or laptop so that the copying process is fast (by comparison on my 2 year old HP PC running Windows 7 copying 900 GB from one HDD to another [both USB] took about 10 hours).

(2) Try plugging your bad HDD into 2-3 different machines, especially Win 8, Win 7 and Win XP. I had a seagate HDD which crashed but which could be opened on Win 7 (XP refused).

(3) You can use Stellar Data Recovery -- it's a fabulous software and can recover data that appears to be lost.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Originally Posted by nitinbose

Hi, I have a WD 3TB external HDD which suddenly became very slow. For example to copy 100MB would take about 2-3 hours. The drive is pretty much detectable and accessible from Windows/Mac, its just the extreme slow speed that worries me.

Any suggestions?

I suggest that you do not try running defrag or any other tool that writes to your disk. The last thing you want to do with a suspect disc is shift data around on it.

Copy the data off... however long it takes, and do that right away, because a suspect-health disc may be a dead disc the next time you power it up.

Or... just restore to a new disc from your backup. You have got a backup, right?

If you haven't, I'm sure its a mistake you won't make again once you have copied all that data off.

Please don't think I'm being preachy here: it's a lesson we all tend to learn the hard way, and it was all the more shameful for me because this stuff used to be my profession <blush>

[anupmathur]

Originally Posted by nitinbose

Hi, I have a WD 3TB external HDD which suddenly became very slow. For example to copy 100MB would take about 2-3 hours. The drive is pretty much detectable and accessible from Windows/Mac, its just the extreme slow speed that worries me.

Any suggestions?

Nitin, tweak the Windows registry exactly as described in this article:
http://www.pommepause.com/2009/11/fi...omment-page-1/

[nitinbose]

Originally Posted by Kumar R

Yes, stellar's rates are very steep !

I can suggest three things

(1) Buy a new hard disk and simply copy all your data to the new one. Be sure to plug both old and new HDDs into a super-power PC or laptop so that the copying process is fast (by comparison on my 2 year old HP PC running Windows 7 copying 900 GB from one HDD to another [both USB] took about 10 hours).

(2) Try plugging your bad HDD into 2-3 different machines, especially Win 8, Win 7 and Win XP. I had a seagate HDD which crashed but which could be opened on Win 7 (XP refused).

(3) You can use Stellar Data Recovery -- it's a fabulous software and can recover data that appears to be lost.

I have a new disk but just that the copying is extremely slow. I hope the stellar guys won't intentionally damage my hdd if I take it back from them without opting for recovery from them.

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

I suggest that you do not try running defrag or any other tool that writes to your disk. The last thing you want to do with a suspect disc is shift data around on it.

Copy the data off... however long it takes, and do that right away, because a suspect-health disc may be a dead disc the next time you power it up.

Or... just restore to a new disc from your backup. You have got a backup, right?

If you haven't, I'm sure its a mistake you won't make again once you have copied all that data off.

Please don't think I'm being preachy here: it's a lesson we all tend to learn the hard way, and it was all the more shameful for me because this stuff used to be my profession <blush>

You're absolutely right, no write operations. I do have some backup but not all. The disk contains my music, videos, photos etc. from the year 2000.