External drive error

[jnelsoninjax]

I have an internal 1 TB WD Green drive that I am using in an external dock and yesterday it was accessing very slow, and some of the directories could not be accessed, so I ran windows disk checkup and it found errors and stated that it needed to take the drive offline to finish the repairs, so I allowed it to do so, and now the Windows is indicating that the drive needs to be formatted. Crystal disk info shows no errors with the drive, but windows still seems to think that it is not formatted. What are my options here, is it possible to recover from this, perhaps using Spinrite?

[+Warwagon MVC]

My guess, is that the drive may have developed a bad sector. I have seen that even when crystal disk info shows healthy. You could try running Spinrite, but if it's formated as GPT ... it may be an issue. 

 

You may want to give this a read. In your case you don't have the "massive amount" of bad sectors.

 

Recover data from a hard drive with massive uncorrectable bad sectors.

[Riggers]

Iv`e had success in the past with TestDisk, it`s not the easiest of programs to work with but should be able to help. Do plenty of reading on it, them double check before any commands are entered.  Sounds like the partition has been lost.

 

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

What does your SMART data pick up? I would trust it more than CrystalDisk.

 

This your old WD MyBook drive that you took apart?

 

Edit: If Windows is showing up weird, try getting a linux boot USB, and run their SMART software. There are other ones available as well.

[jnelsoninjax]

  On 15/09/2020 at 15:01, Mindovermaster said:

What does your SMART data pick up? I would trust it more than CrystalDisk.

 

This your old WD MyBook drive that you took apart?

 

Edit: If Windows is showing up weird, try getting a linux boot USB, and run their SMART software. There are other ones available as well.

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SMART shows everything is OK. It is not the MyBook drive.

[adrynalyne]

  On 15/09/2020 at 15:01, Mindovermaster said:

What does your SMART data pick up? I would trust it more than CrystalDisk.

 

This your old WD MyBook drive that you took apart?

 

Edit: If Windows is showing up weird, try getting a linux boot USB, and run their SMART software. There are other ones available as well.

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CrystalDiskInfo is reading SMART data...to not trust it, is to not trust SMART.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

  On 15/09/2020 at 15:10, adrynalyne said:

CrystalDiskInfo is reading SMART data...to not trust it, is to not trust SMART.

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Then why is CrystalDisk showing different than Windows SMART?

[adrynalyne]

  On 15/09/2020 at 15:35, Mindovermaster said:

Then why is CrystalDisk showing different than Windows SMART?

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There is one SMART and its at a firmware level. There is no such thing as "Windows SMART".

[+Warwagon MVC]

  On 15/09/2020 at 15:35, Mindovermaster said:

Then why is CrystalDisk showing different than Windows SMART?

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not sure what you mean by "Windows Smart" ... every smart utility reads the same smart parameters.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

  On 15/09/2020 at 15:48, warwagon said:

not sure what you mean by "Windows Smart" ... every smart utility reads the same smart parameters.

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By that I mean, not through an other program. It is "built into Windows"

[adrynalyne]

  On 15/09/2020 at 16:25, Mindovermaster said:

By that I mean, not through an other program. It is "built into Windows"

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You are confusing a Windows feature for checking filesystems with hardware error reporting. They are naturally going to give different results depending on the issue. Windows cares about filesystems. SMART cares about hardware.

 

From the sounds of it, it was an unrecoverable filesystem error. The OP needs to look at data recovery utilities and not dwell on the differences between these. Lets move on, yes?

[Riggers]

Thought you said it was 1TB, that`s a 5TB drive your showing CrystalDisk info for!

 

Anyway, download TestDisk, extract to a folder, run testdisk-6.13/testdisk_win.exe as Administrator -> select whether to create a log file -> Is the disk listed in the next window? -> If yes, select it using up and down arrows then proceed -> In the next windows it should have already worked out the partition structure, probably either Intel or GPT ->  What does it say here?

 

Don`t proceed if you`re not comfortable, also it`s easier if you remove all drives other than the boot drive.

[adrynalyne]

  On 15/09/2020 at 16:53, Riggers said:

Thought you said it was 1TB, that`s a 5TB drive your showing CrystalDisk info for!

 

Anyway, download TestDisk, extract to a folder, run testdisk-6.13/testdisk_win.exe as Administrator -> select whether to create a log file -> Is the disk listed in the next window? -> If yes, select it using up and down arrows then proceed -> In the next windows it should have already worked out the partition structure, probably either Intel or GPT ->  What does it say here?

 

Don`t proceed if you`re not comfortable, also it`s easier if you remove all drives other than the boot drive.

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I think he is just looking at the top entries; he has several drives...which...

 

@jnelsoninjax Is the drive in question the one that shows "caution"? Show us that screen.

[jnelsoninjax]

  On 15/09/2020 at 16:55, adrynalyne said:

I think he is just looking at the top entries; he has several drives...which...

 

@jnelsoninjax Is the drive in question the one that shows "caution"? Show us that screen.

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The drive in question is the one I showed the data from (J:), I am aware of the other drive, and it's old, I only use it to store my downloads until I move them elsewhere.

Also drives H,J,K are all external J and K are in a USB dock, and H is an ioSafe drive.

But since you asked, here you go @adrynalyne

Edited September 15, 2020 by jnelsoninjax

[Circaflex]

Green drive, get rid of it now. Those things are junk and you're playing with fire. Back it up and dump it.

 

 

^^ sectors going bad is never a good thing, you can always try a /chkdsk /f /r and see if windows can repair the drive, but YMMV.

[jnelsoninjax]

  On 15/09/2020 at 23:20, Circaflex said:

Green drive, get rid of it now. Those things are junk and you're playing with fire. Back it up and dump it.

 

 

^^ sectors going bad is never a good thing, you can always try a /chkdsk /f /r and see if windows can repair the drive, but YMMV.

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There's nothing of value on that drive, so if it dies, I may replace it with an SSD, not sure what I'll do.

[adrynalyne]

  On 15/09/2020 at 23:59, jnelsoninjax said:

There's nothing of value on that drive, so if it dies, I may replace it with an SSD, not sure what I'll do.

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I have a black drive suffering from the same above. I ordered a gold and am expecting it tomorrow. 

[jnelsoninjax]

  On 16/09/2020 at 00:36, adrynalyne said:

I have a black drive suffering from the same above. I ordered a gold and am expecting it tomorrow. 

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What is the price difference between the green and the gold?

[Jim K Global Moderator]

  On 16/09/2020 at 00:37, jnelsoninjax said:

What is the price difference between the green and the gold?

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Western Digital discontinued the green HDDs a couple of years ago...I think the Blue drives are the Green drives.  The price difference between a Blue and a Gold is quite substantial at same capacity...but Gold and Black are roughly the same (Gold being a little more).

[jnelsoninjax]

  On 16/09/2020 at 00:54, Jim K said:

Western Digital discontinued the green HDDs a couple of years ago.

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I see, I noticed that I happen to have 2 of them laying around, one is from MyBook and the other is one that got pulled out of another system some time ago. So when I go to replace one of them that is inside my system, would I be wise to go with a spinning disk, or an SSD?

[+Warwagon MVC]

  On 16/09/2020 at 00:57, jnelsoninjax said:

I see, I noticed that I happen to have 2 of them laying around, one is from MyBook and the other is one that got pulled out of another system some time ago. So when I go to replace one of them that is inside my system, would I be wise to go with a spinning disk, or an SSD?

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I recommend HDD for storage and SSD for boot drive. Due to the cost per gig and the write limit over time of an SSD, plus HDD's tend (but not always) to die more gracefully than an SSD.

[Jim K Global Moderator]

No idea.  If looking for high capacity, primarily for storage and you're on a budget than a HDD is much cheaper.  If you're looking for smaller capacities ... boot drives and even a game drive than a SSD is your best bet.

[adrynalyne]

  On 16/09/2020 at 00:37, jnelsoninjax said:

What is the price difference between the green and the gold?

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 Not sure vs. green but its maybe 10% more than Black for double the reliability numbers and near identical performance.

[jnelsoninjax]

So to finish this saga, the other HDD on the dock did the same exact thing. I used GetDataBack to recover the data off of both the drives, and formatted both of the external drives. I have no idea why all of the sudden these drives decided to quit working like this, but at least I got the data off of them.

[jnelsoninjax]

OK, apparently this saga is not finished Today, both the drives in question (both are in a sata-usb dock) show up as not formatted. I am beginning to suspect that it is the dock that is causing the problem with the drives, but I really have no idea on what/how to test this theory. In device manager there is one USB device with a bang next to it, it is simply referred to as 'unknown USB Device (Device Descriptor Request Failed' I am assuming that this is the dock, but when I power off the dock, the unknown device remains.