Seagate 1TB 7200.12 Problems

[Xernicus]

Alright... so it would seem that my rig has been taking my HDD's and tossing them aside as of late. :s
As some of you know, my 3TB drive failed a few weeks ago, and now my 1TB system drive (which held a lot of hurriedly copied info from the 3tb drive) is now giving me sh!t.

I'm hoping that someone here can give me a hand- here's the situation:

So in the past few days, I have been noticing that my computer has been s...l...o...w at times, and after a few hours of putting up with it, I decided to reboot. It POSTed just fine, and started Windows like normal, and after I logged in, I notice that the HD activity light is on solid, and my drive seems quite quiet. 

After waiting for my startup programs, Hard Disk Sentinel (which I swear by... we all have those programs) reported that there are some weak sectors, and that there was data transmission issues. The advice was to back up (ofc), and change the data and/or power cables.

So I reboot my machine, using the latest UBCD, and load up Seatools for DOS. It plugs along just fine, and passes the SMART and short DST tests. During the long test, it gave me a fail code. However, it gave me the option to re-allocate some bad blocks/sectors, to which I OK'd- and the status is now "PASSED after repair".

Still kind of panicky, I reboot my machine and try to get into Windows. No go, amigo. It is slow as f--king balls in molasses. So I go ahead and kill the power, and swap my HD's to another SATA controller, thinking that perhaps a power problem fried the controller.*

Give it another go, and it's still slow. So I guess it isn't the controller. (Is there any way of testing these damn things? I could get a SATA TTL adapter perhaps?) My experience with dead HD controllers also told me that there was more to the story.
 

Next step was to boot back into the UBCD, and fire up VivaRD in remap mode. It flies along (~14,000 mb/s), and gives me a report back that the disk is healthy. Now I'm relatively sure that the disk surface is alright (enough), but the issues of the speed is due to file system corruption. I boot off of a Windows 7 installation USB drive that I made, and am currently running chkdsk (chkdsk E: /R /B). 

Now I am probably around 36 hours in. There were several unreadable file handles during stage 1. It just completed the Index Verification (stage 2 AFAIK) and is now "Scanning unindexed files for reconnect to their original directory". Altogether, about 15% complete.

So I am trying to figure out my next step. I have some ideas, but I figured it would be better to get some opinions:

1. I could wait for chkdsk to complete, and then copy off important files using another machine
2. I could wait for chkdsk, then run SpinRite in lvl 2 before copying off info, in case chkdsk f--ked up some files (which it did... but nothing too major lost. I could probably fix the problems with DISM, and reinstall some games)
3. I could *quit* chkdsk once it reaches stage 3, and hook the drive up to a *NIX machine, and run ntfs-fix. 

I *do not* currently have another 1TB+ sized drive, but after I get one, I *am* planning on running ddrescue. 

All I really care about getting off is my photography, which would not require ddrescue at this point afaik. 

I would run for data recovery services, but I can do most of that myself... all I lack is a clean room. And I do not think the problem is mechanical. I also don't have money to waste. (I'm practically dirt poor atm )

I have heard some recommendations of software called "R-Studio" to fix filesystem problems, and I'm wondering if anyone has experience with that. 
---

There's something else that I've gotten wind of... and that is using MHDD to check/modify the drive's firmware and hidden settings in order to force it to not reallocate, and stop re-scanning sectors, which would speed up the data copying quite a bit. Alternatively, I have heard of adjusting some variables for the translator sub-system. 

Unfortunately, all of the "fixes" I have seen are for the 7200.11 drives, and cannot be used on the 7200.12 drives. :/

---
So to wrap this all up, here's what I'm curious about:
1. What software is recommended to fix NTFS corruption?
2. Any other tests I can/should run to check data integrity, surface condition, etc?
3. AFAIK running SpinRite in read-(write inverse)-read-(write data) could help regenerate magnetically "weak" sectors?
4. Does anybody have experiance with using MHDD on a Seagate 7200.12 1TB drive to help with regenerating the translators or bypassing some hidden features like reallocation to speed things up?

---
SMART has not been tripped, and all programs along with BIOS report the correct size, and that the drive is healthy.

If anybody has more information it would be much appreciated as well. If you have to Google what SMART is, please do not post.

*The only thing I can imagine that would've damaged my drives is during a self-test of my UPS system. It cannot provide enough current (vA) to supply everything with power now that I have upgraded my CPU months back. Thus, there is a moment where the voltage drops (brownout) when the UPS is testing the battery- it has a visible effect on my florescent light (it flickers/turns off), but my computer always stays running.

On an additional note, I'll be gone until I can get this all solved. It could take awhile. I have my ETKey backed up, but not my Silent.dat file. So I might need a lvlset on SilEnT servers. But I think my lvls reset on SilEnT servers due to inactivity anyway... 

[Masa_1964]

Ones HD starts giving reallocation sectors HD is lost. I would not run any fixing programs cause those just stresses more failed disk.

Usually I just use other PC for making direct copy from failed disk and then try to repair HD and if repair does good then make another copy of it and toss failed on pin

 

But if you dont have extra pc for doing it then I would just have new hd and install system and install failed one as slave and save data then.

 

When HD starts making those reallocation sectors it means at it has run out from sectors which HD it self is fixing before it gives any errors. SMART data is showing some times that info also (depends disk and manufacturer)

 

Power drops is fatal only while writing other than temp data (depens what ops u have?)

 

Masa_1964

 

P.S remeber place HD to be fixed cool place (heat will reduce performance) if possible use long cables to set is external. I have used also cooling plates from fridge

[Novice]

I have a similar drive 1397GB Seagate ST1500DL003-9VT16L ATA Device (SATA) 83 °F and I have not had any issues in the 4+ years I had it. However I will say for anyone else reading, don't ever, ever, buy an HDD that is label as a "Green" energy efficient drive. What these drives do is slow down or power down repeatedly IIRC every minute or so it will spin down and power down, causing excessive unnecessary wear on the drive. I am now starting to notice this bottleneck in my PC as it is becoming very sluggish everyday that goes by. Moving over to SSD soon, and will absolutely not buy another drive labeled as green. 

 

I really think I just been lucky with this drive, cause I have beat the crap out of it, and it has not been in the most ideal environment.

[redy.]

for your own sake: Dont trust this disk and get a new one. You have photography on the disk that seems to be important to you and you probably dont want to live with the risk of loosing your data.

 

In case the HDD inst readable anymore. The following trick helped me with two different bad disks in the past:

https://www.google.com/#q=hard+drive+in+freezer

 

In regards to seagate: My recommendation would be to go with Western Digital for magnetic and Samsung or Crucial for SSD.

[Xernicus]

I'd like to thank you all for sharing your experiance, expertise, advice, etc. It is much appreciated.

I'm happy to report that I got all of my important work and photography off of the drive. It is stored on an offline backup drive. I was also able to repair the disk, and it now has 0 reallocated sectors, and of course 0 sectors pending reallocation. It took plenty of time fo sho, but it looks like I lucked out, and the "bad" sectors were software created, not a hardware issue indeed.

Ones HD starts giving reallocation sectors HD is lost.

P.S remeber place HD to be fixed cool place (heat will reduce performance) if possible use long cables to set is external. I have used also cooling plates from fridge

I have seen drives that follow what you say- once they start shelling out sectors, they die quickly. I have also had drives that have *hundreds of thousands* of bad sectors and still kept running strong, for over 4-5 years.
I should plug in that drive and see if it still spins up... could be fun.
 

I have a similar drive 1397GB Seagate ST1500DL003-9VT16L ATA Device (SATA) 83 °F and I have not had any issues in the 4+ years I had it. However I will say for anyone else reading, don't ever, ever, buy an HDD that is label as a "Green" energy efficient drive. What these drives do is slow down or power down repeatedly IIRC every minute or so it will spin down and power down, causing excessive unnecessary wear on the drive. I am now starting to notice this bottleneck in my PC as it is becoming very sluggish everyday that goes by. Moving over to SSD soon, and will absolutely not buy another drive labeled as green. 

 

I really think I just been lucky with this drive, cause I have beat the crap out of it, and it has not been in the most ideal environment.

+1 on not buying a "green" drive. I don't think any of my drives are the "green" varient... Though I have all of the power management stuff turned off (never spins down), though I left the AAM at default to (possibly) help with load on the heads. This drive is slightly over 4 years old as well, still working... at least for now

 

for your own sake: Dont trust this disk and get a new one. You have photography on the disk that seems to be important to you and you probably dont want to live with the risk of loosing your data.

 

In case the HDD inst readable anymore. The following trick helped me with two different bad disks in the past:

https://www.google.com/#q=hard+drive+in+freezer

 

In regards to seagate: My recommendation would be to go with Western Digital for magnetic and Samsung or Crucial for SSD.

Even though it's "fixed" (for now at least), I'm not going to trust it. I'll probably have some important documents and some photos on it, but nothing that isn't backed up. As for choosing the next HD, I'll probably go with a WD Black drive after my experiances... (or a Seagate Constellation, if their support can win me back over) however I have exclusively used Seagate disks in my computers, custom builds, servers, RAIDs, and for clients as well-- for around 10 years. This is the second problem I've had with a Seagate HDD, compared to countless probs with WD drives. I have two right next to my desk w/ a head crash, one with a bad controller/translator, etc. It's just the luck of the draw, I suppose.

For memory and SSDs, Crucial/Micron is my "go-to" company. I have some Micron laptops of yesteryear that have also held up quite well.

What the "killer" is, was that after my 3TB drive failed (which had a 1TB partition to backup this disk), I had to cram files on disks... if there was free space, it was used. So more than the system, files that would normally not be on this drive were indeed, and comprimised as a result.