Hard drive makes noise and is not recognized

Boris_yo

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 22, 2011
Messages
224
Hello,

I haven't used my hard drive for over a year. It was in my cabinet all that time. It's a 2.5 inch hard drive from laptop that I put into external closure and connected with 2 split USB cables (one is data and another is power)

It makes some weird noise and is not recognized in Windows 7. Here is a video I made:

 
I would find an adapter to connect it directly to your PCs SATA.
The less translation/strange electronics between the drive, the less chance of something screwing everything up.
The problem you have might simply be the USB cable setup.

Once you have done that, see if it works.
If it doesnt, check if its detected in the bios setup and report back.
 
HDD takes long time until drive letter appears but it is not accessible. HDD is being detected in device properties under device manager in Windows.

Connected it to 15-year old laptop. BIOS doesn't offer detection options but it has low-level diagnostic tool. I ran it and HDD failed diagnostic.

Used Hiren's boot CD to boot in Windows PE environment. Ran CHKDSK which got stuck on 2nd phase. Booted to MS-DOS and ran HDD tool that found almost 200 bad sectors. Started bad read and bad sectors repair process but it was just too slow that it would take weeks to go through entire process.
 
Thats good news it is detected, there is a chance it can be recovered.

To repair bad sectors on a severely screwed drive you need a product like Spinrite or HDD Regenerator.
Spinrite probably wont work on many drives over 1TB because it hasnt been updated since 2004, so that leaves HDD regenerator.
I used both and recovered some really fucked drives.

Bad sectors are not necessarily bad, they can be caused by a write that failed due to a power glitch, an overheated or very cold drive with expanded/shrunk platters that make the write head put data in the wrong place, or some other strangeness.
These utils will repair the data on a bad sector and relocate it if the sector is truly bad.
I used Spinrite on a drive that was constantly clicking and resetting the drive head position, the drive was recovered back to full function with no problems!
HDD Regenerator would have done the same, they perform magic.
I recovered probably around 20 drives with them.

This is the page for HDD regenerator:
http://www.dposoft.net/hdd.html
Partway down is a link to a demo of it, use this to see if it can access and repair your drive (it fixes one bad sector).
If that works and your data is worth it, buy the full version to fix your whole drive in one go (currently $60).

It can take a few days to finish a drive, depending how big it is and how many bad sectors there are.
Put the drive in the fastest computer you can and make sure it is directly connected to a SATA port, not through USB.
 
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Tried many things. Its firmware gets detected in different disk tools but all attempts led to "Cyclic Redundancy Error" when trying to create partition in Diskpart or create/rebuild MBR in another tool.

When I connected HDD internally to laptop, it POSTed okay but in the end all my attempts above led to laptop restart loop, not proceeding beyond POST.

The HDD is kaput. It didn't have important data on it and I managed to recover something I found useful before I started messing with HDD tools. I was just interested in making HDD useful again.
 
CRC error means an error in the data was found so it decided not to use it, to be expected.
You should have tried what I suggested, booting off that media doesnt need the hard drive to be functional, just detected.
But if you dont value the data and the drive isnt worth the cost of buying it isunfortunate/fortunate depending on your point of view.
 
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