WD SATA 500GB HDD Failure

My Windows 7 failed to boot one fine day and therefore I had to boot using windows cd and perform recovery process.

However, the recovery was not succesfull as it kept hanging and nothing happens. I kept trying and the same thing happened.

Left without a choice, I went to purchase a new HDD  and installed windows in it as my new operating system.

Now comes the most important part, I have to recover all my important data from the failed HDD (age 2 years). Hence, I connected the HDD to my pc via USB (as external HDD) and Disk Management showed that HDD as UNALLOCATED DISK SPACE.

After doing much research, I used TESTDISK to recover the lost partitions and voila, everything came back and all the files and folders were visible and accessible again.

Well, without hesitating I started copying the files to another HDD, but the transfer speed was really slow. I left it to run and came back 2 hours later, but I found out that file transfer was interrupted halfway due to some file error.

I proceeded to cancel the process and the computer hung, so I had to force shut down the PC.

However, after rebooting windows, the partitions were not able to be accessed anymore. Althought My Computer detected the partitions, and even showed their volume drive (ie: G: H: I: J:) , it failed to read the partitions. Even if I clicked on the partitions, MY COMPUTER will just freeze for a long time. Several times I was told that “incorrect parameter”.

I’ve tried numerous ways to recover my files back or even to just access the partitions - Ubundu USB Boot, TESTDISK, Photorec, getdataback, but nothing worked and my system just hang whenever I try to access the partitions.

Is there anything I can do? Or am I doomed? I really hope someone here can help me!,!

I believe I still have some hope as I can still see the logical drives everytime I plug in the HDD. It’s just that they can’t be accessed!

PS: I am currently running HDD Regenerator. So far this is the only tool that is working and able to scan the HDD. After 2 hours of running, it is only 3%.

Hello,

You can try to run a full diagnostic on the drive with a DLG tool. That will try to repair any bad sectors on the unit. and then try again with any of the backup software that you have.

Whenever you use a USB drive to boot up, you will find it will be extemely slow especially with a thumb drive due to transfer rates.  You could try booting to your Windows disk and try repairing but do not reinstall windows or you will lose everything on your drive. 

I wouldn’t get your hopes up that hdd regenerator will do anything useful for you.

I first heard about that like 8 years ago and the explanation as to how it works seems sketchy

AND I have NOT seen it work so…

I would say that the other guy reminding you about USB connection transfer speeds is an excellent point.

If its plugged in that way I guess you would be throttling the speed of the drive drastically.

I would try and check the drive for damage using something like DLG diag for DOS.

That way you can see what your dealing with in order to make the right steps.

Testdisk is a cool program to fix bad partition info. But I would think twice about using ckdisk or sfc

both of the windows repair commands can make things worse. I have seen with my own eyes windows

attempting to repair corrupt data and having it report success but after viewing files finding they are corrupted and data is gone for good.
So what I mean is various drive repair tools may make things worse for you but TestDisk isn’t gonna mess with your files it will only be used for changing partition data / settings so I wouldn’t worry about trying that out compared to say running chkdisk for example.

Scan that drive for errors ! (that’s the first thing I would do If I were you)

I use a USB flash drive with a bootable copy of Hiren’s Boot CD for stuff like that…

It has WD diag and many other very similar tools as well as TestDisk and others all pre installed.

Also it does not have any illegal content on it so its easy, safe and legal.

You can burn Hiren’s to a standard 700mb CD or CDRW or DVD or even a USB flash drive.

If you want to try that out here is the download site…

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

And this link will show you how to install it onto a USB drive instead of a CD/DVD

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd-on-usb-disk