Bad HDD. Hope For Recovering?

I recently had an issue with Windows 10 freezing on the load screen while booting.

After installing and booting into Ubuntu, I found out that my second hard drive was not accessible.  This is my main storage but separate from the drive that windows is installed on.

As soon as I unhooked the hard drive windows started right up.  So obviously there's a big problem with the hard drive.

The HDD is a Western Digital Blue 1TB.  It's just over two years old.

I tried booting into windows and then hooking up the hard drive but windows would not see it, even after scanning.

I had to order a new hard drive anyway so I ordered a usb to SATA adapter.  When I plug it in, windows now sees the drive.  However, as soon as I attempt to open a file explorer window the computer freezes up.  It doesn't totally freeze up.  I can move the cursor and even open task manager but not much else.  If I pull out the usb connecting the hard drive the computer comes right back to life.  It's like it's trying to read something but unable to.  

I downloaded a couple of free trials of recovery programs to see if they would do anything (Recuva and KrollOntrack)  Basically the same thing happened with them.  I could plug the hard drive in and start up the recover program but as soon as I hit scan everything froze up and the recover program crashed.

The hard drive spins up when power is applied and there is no clicking or other outward signs of physical damage.

So, main question - Is there any hope (outside of prohibitively expensive recovery services) of getting my data back?  

Any ideas for further troubleshooting I could try?

Normally I'm good about backing everything up but I had a large amount of photos on this hard drive from a recent trip that I hadn't gotten around to copying over to other drives yet.  Shame on me.

Thanks for any help or ideas!

Edited by hamluis, 08 December 2017 - 03:53 PM.
Moved from Internal Hardware to Backup/Imaging/Disk Mgmt - Hamluis.

Sounds like there is an internal short in the drive that messes any attempt at accessing the data or the read heads.

At this point, all I can suggest are various virtual programs that may or may not work, but that I have used on occasion to access data on failed drives.

First, I would connect the bad drive directly in your computer, as opposed to using the USB adapter; that may not have anything to do with it, but in cases like this I like to keep all connections as direct and simple as possible. IOW, just connect it normally to your computer.

Set your BIOS to 1st boot device = CD (you probably have done that already).

Virtual distros that have worked for me in the past:
 

Parted Magic       (try this first)

Link to tutorial: Parted Magic Tut

Fatdog64

Knoppix

File Scavenger

Note that I have not used File Scavenger for a time. It has worked for me in that past, but I am not certain if this will only notify you that it has found files and can reclaim them, but you may have to pay for the full product to actually retrieve them. I'm not sure. But, if so, at least  you will have found something that claims to work.

I will review if I have any more to recommend, but this will get you started.

I would appreciate it if you could let us know if any of these worked (or not), so I have a better idea of the range of these products.

Thank you for the response.  I will try Parted Magic.

I went back into the Linux side again.  Here, opening a file manager window with the HDD hooked in does not cause a crash or freeze anything up.  It still can't open it but after trying for a few minutes I get the following Error Message:
 

 

Error mounting /dev/sdc1 at /media/josh/626288BB62889587: Command-line `mount -t "ntfs" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=1000,gid=1000" "/dev/sdc1" "/media/josh/626288BB62889587"' exited with non-zero exit status 13: The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
Falling back to read-only mount because the NTFS partition is in an
unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation
or fast restarting.)
ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.

If that information is of any use...   Unfortunately I'm unable to modify or access the drive in any way from the windows side.

Thanks again.

It's quite possible the only hope is the very-often very-expensive route:  a data recovery company / specialist who can do the clean room operations necessary to recover whatever can be recovered.

Because this drive freezes on Windows try the following using Parted Magic. Open a terminal in Parted Magic and type the following command. This will attempt to correct the unclean file system.

ntfsfix /dev/sdc1

 After doing the command see if you can mount the drive again per the tutorial ranchhand posted.  If that fails it may be a hardware fault as Parted Magic could not mount the drive even in read only mode.

Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault

You were able to previously use your keyboard and mouse in Parted Magic, correct? Fatdog64 may be a better option.

Fatdog is UEFI capable and also can boot with SecureBoot enabled. If you can boot Ubuntu you can use ntfsfix and terminal in Ubuntu. 

Edit: Are your mouse and keyboard attached to USB3 ports. That may be why parted magic does not detect them if you are not using the latest purchased version which is $9 $11. The parted magic version ranchhand linked to is quite  old.

Edited by JohnC_21, 08 December 2017 - 04:06 PM.

Yes, the website I linked you to was for a free version, but older. I should have warned you, my bad. However, maybe $11 is not much money to take a chance that the newer version might work? And really, it is an excellent piece of software for the money that can prove very helpful in future emergencies.

Don't forget to try Knoppix (an often overlooked but excellent distro) and File Scavenger.

Another straw to grasp at if nothing else works....an old trick for getting a mechanically failing drive to give a few last gasps of life is to wrap it in plastic and put it in the refrigerator for an hour. Then connect it and try to access your files. Probably will not work in this circumstance, but worth a shot.

I just went ahead and purchased a copy of the up to date Parted Magic. 

First I just attempted to mount the drives as suggested in the tutorial.  Partitions on my other hard drives mounted fine.  The bad hard drive will not mount.  When I click on the mount button the window just disappears.  I bring the mount window back up, the other drives are still mounted but nothing on the bad hard drive.

It sees the drive and knows the size and the name and the file system but it won't mount it. 

Tried running the ntfsfix command and got a FAILED result initially.  I turned the drive upside down and got something more but it still will not mount.

Here's the terminal:

 

root@PartedMagic:~# ntfsfix /dev/sdc1
Mounting volume... Failed to write lock '/dev/sdc1': Resource temporarily unavailable
Error opening '/dev/sdc1': Resource temporarily unavailable
FAILED
Attempting to correct errors... Failed to write lock '/dev/sdc1': Resource temporarily unavailable
Error opening '/dev/sdc1': Resource temporarily unavailable
FAILED
Failed to startup volume: Resource temporarily unavailable
Failed to write lock '/dev/sdc1': Resource temporarily unavailable
Error opening '/dev/sdc1': Resource temporarily unavailable
Volume is corrupt. You should run chkdsk.
root@PartedMagic:~# ntfsfix /dev/sdc1
Mounting volume... The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
FAILED
Attempting to correct errors...
Processing $MFT and $MFTMirr...
Reading $MFT... OK
Reading $MFTMirr... OK
Comparing $MFTMirr to $MFT... OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Setting required flags on partition... OK
Going to empty the journal ($LogFile)... OK
Checking the alternate boot sector... OK
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
NTFS partition /dev/sdc1 was processed successfully.
 

Strange.  The disc spins up and sounds fine but nothing more.

Well, it appears at least the mouse & keyboard are working now. Move on to the other distros and see what happens.

The Parted Magic disk has a icon on the desktop called Disk Health or possible GsmartControl. Run the short and long tests if possible. When you run Gsmartcontrol there is a good chance your external drive will show red. If that is the case I think the only way you can recover your data is using a professional recovery service.

The Disk Health tool sees the drive as "Unknown Model."  When I double click to get more information, this is all I get:

 

smartctl 6.5 2016-05-07 r4318 [x86_64-linux-4.12.9-pmagic64] (local build)
Copyright © 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

Read Device Identity failed: scsi error unsupported field in scsi command

A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.

I tried Knoppix but nothing new there either.  Thank you guys for all the helpful suggestions though.