At a loss here, guys. help? (highly technical)

General Discussion Games and Tech
#1

Ok so the hard drive that came with my computer when i built it, has failed several times, and i’ve continued to reformat and reuse it. This is what i keep windows on. Recently, as far as I can tell, it failed completely, to the point where being plugged in at all (sata) causes bios to freeze during post. it doesn’t show up in gparted or testdisk. Plugged in with a usb-sata cord it shows up in Disks, but with no media, no disk size, etc. basically as if the cord had no hdd attached. i found it with grep sd, but it failed to clone with ddrescue, saying no medium found. I thought at first it was the sata cable, or the motherboard port, but no. also tried plugging it in via usb to a windows 8 pc, and still got no media. it found the cord, just like disks. Looks like I’m gonna have to buy a HDD enclosure and a new HDD and try to clone it that way.

Thoughts? Ideas? Desperate hail mary’s?

#2

This will definitely be a long-shot because I’m not nearly as PC savvy as I used to be, but it sounds like your partitions got messed up and it’s not recognizing anything. This is common with frequent reformatting. I don’t really know how you could go about fixing it other than completely wiping the drive via a program like DBAN; Darik’s Boot And Nuke. If that doesn’t fix it, it may be a hardware related issue and not a software problem. At that point I’d consider getting a new drive if you can get it replaced.

Apologies if this wasn’t much help, but I figured any response would be better than no response if this could potentially point you in the right direction.

#3

the drive is definitely bad, its been bad a while. its the fact that the comp freezes at bios with it even plugged in thats irking me. hot swapping it in doesn’t give me anything either. really i just want to pull my user profile off it, and just add them to a new HDD later. it’s several hundred gigs of d/l games i don’t want to d’l again.

#4

So even if you could wipe it, you’re not even able to change the boot priority in the BIOS to a disk, are you?

#5

i cant wipe it because i cant find it. cant boot with it in, and any recovery i could run from disk would need it on sata not usb. hot swapping and then running recovery programs found no data. complete logical failure looks like. disk plates are spinning, but the logic board is bad on the HDD itself is what im guessing.

Or equally likely, corruption in the system area of the the partitions.

#6

Yeah, that’s unfortunate. I’m sorry if you end up losing your data. I’ve never dealt with a HDD issue so severe that it’s not even recognizable or transferable. Who made your drive, if you don’t mind me asking?

#7

Have you tried using Testdisk? ( free, open-source program )

#8

He said Testdisk won’t recognize it either.

#9

It’s a 2tb seagate barracuda. I’ve known the drive was ■■■■ for a while now. They all are. But it came with the barebones kit I bought in 2012. Just to cheap to buy a new one until forced. My wife has my 3tb wd green, and I also have a half full 4tb wd black(killer hd) but all my Windows games were on the ■■■■ drive.

#10

That likely explains some of it. I’ve never personally used anything other than WD (usually Blacks), but I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about Seagate.

#11

The 2012 2 and 3 tb in particular are horrendous.

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