How Can I Transfer The Corrupt Files From My Broken Seagate 3TB HD to my New Not Broken WD?

Question

A Couple of months ago, I dropped my Seagate 3TB. Once. Some of the files in it are corrupted, and I can t copy paste them into another HD. I tried using Arq and RSync. It all gave me errors. When transferring files from the Seagate to the WD, a file would eventually give me THIS (Picture below) and then give up copying the rest of the files

https://i.imgur.com/EJhUA7f.png

I have a lot of files on this broken HD and I m scared I m gonna never be able to transfer them. Instead they ll just sit there and I ll never be able to open them again. Videos lag like hell and some documents don t even open.

Is there a way to still transfer these files even though this is happening?

Answer 1

There is already damage that drop caused it you knew that already, that is why people always advise you to do backup all the time, no matter how you slice and dice it those files are lost nothing can be done, I forgot the high-school level joke but college-level term is "those files > /dev/null" Nothing can be done, You can and should but told us have not done manually copying the files that can still be read, laggy or not DO IT NOW, nothing else can be done for others really got damaged.



Or done within reasonably actionable activity. You have done as much as an individual can do but it is outside the purview of some software solution, so the unreasonable action is to pay big bucks for data storage recovery. But this is the big gotcha: they give you a huge byte blob, no attempt nor was it possible for them to parse out that here suppose to be a Word document or that is a video of someone's wedding or ...

Answer 2

"I dropped my Seagate 3TB. Once. Some of the files in it are corrupted, and I can t copy paste them into another HD."

"I have a lot of files on this broken HD and I m scared I m gonna never be able to transfer them. Instead they ll just sit there and I ll never be able to open them again."



You seem surprised that dropping sensitive/delicate electronics would not cause any damage. This is a learning moment. In the hard drive are circular, flat metal disks that are coated with a special magnetic material onto which the digital information (a series of zeros and ones) are written that are the content of the various digital files the computer accesses.



In a 3TB drive there will be a stack (4-8) of these disks separated by a very narrow gap. In order for the stored digital data to be read - or for the computer to write data to the hard drive, there is a "head" connected to an armature. Each disk surface has its own head and armature assembly. As the disk spins (anywhere from 5,400 rotations per minute for laptops and some all-in-one desktops to 7,600 rpm tower-type computers to 10,000 rpm for more expensive fast-response time external disks), the armature moves the heads over the disk to read/write data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive



The head cannot touch the disk surface - it is designed to "fly" above the surface of the disk surface. Hard drives are made in a clean room environment. No dust (or larger) allowed. An electrical engineer friend who worked on hard drive design at Seagate a few years ago described the gap between the head and disk spin speed similar to a F-18 fighter jet flying over the surface of the Earth at nearly 2x the speed of sound (~1,200 mph) at an altitude of 6 inches. Then a piece of dust gets on the disc and the head hits it... or a 2 foot tall rock appears in the flight path and the F18 hits it.



When you dropped the hard drive (even if only once), a few things could have happened that would cause the symptoms you are reporting. In my opinion, the most likely cause of the failure is something scruffed the surface of one of the drives. That means the drive got scratches - and the digital zeros and ones that were stored in that area ("sector") can no longer be read by the disk head. The result is the computer interprets this lack of information as a "corrupted file". Another possibility, is the shock of the drop somehow caused damage to the armature assembly so that the heads can't get to a specific place on the drive (which happens to be where the data is that the computer is trying to access)



When you send a drive to a data recovery service, they open the drive in their clean room and using very specialized, expensive, tools and utilities, read and *try* to recover data, 1 sector at a time. This talks a little about data sectors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Calculation

Typically, the disks are removed from the damaged drive and installed in another drive mechanism so known, working, heads and armatures can be used in the data recovery process. While drive recovery services have a really good track record, the type of damage to the drive determines whether recovery is possible. And they can't know the extent of the damage until they get their hands on the drive.



Software disk repair typically addresses a different aspect of drive failures and file corruption (typically not caused from catastrophic hardware issues). These commercially available consumer software recovery tools will use some of the file-recovery methods used by the hard drive recovery services by writing the "understandable" parts of the file to another place. The amount and type of damage dictates whether the damaged file can be recovered (or not).



So... You can either:

1) keep trying different software data recovery tools (which may not change the results you have already gotten);

2) Send the damaged drive to a known, reputable recovery service (I have been successful with Drive Savers).

3) Stop trying to recover the files and learn from the experience by implementing a data back-up. This may mean buying another hard drive in a case that keeps all your files backed up... I use the macOSX included Time Machine and a Time Capsule I got many years ago - but any decently sized external hard drive can be the back up - the goal is to have the files (especially important ones) on more than one drive (the chances that two hard drives will fail at the same time is low - same as the chances that you would drop two hard drives at the same time. ANd if the files are THAT important, then they should be kept "off site" (i.e., not in the same place as the "originals"). Without "cloud storage", that means backing up to anther hard drive and sending it off-site somewhere...

Answer 3

No clue

Answer 4

The standard answer to this is to resurrect the files from another copy or backup. Anyone who keeps only one copy of important files or keeps them only on one drive is asking for trouble.



The most likely explanation is that the heads have hit and damaged the disks' magnetic surfaces. This is particularly likely to happen if the drive was in use at the time. Normally disk drives park the heads in a safe zone when not in use.



Unless it is a life and death situation and you want to throw large bucks at the problem, copy off what you can and forget about the rest.



Most disk drives go through recovery cycles when they have trouble reading. This can involve repeat reads and reading with the heads slightly off track on one side then the other. This can explain stutters and lagging in videos and can result in parts of a video not being viewable. Many video players will allow you to seek over a bad spot without reading it; however, with data files such as Word documents or spreadsheets, the application will not open the file if there is one small that cannot be read.



Always keep multiple backups of important files on separate media and possibly on a Cloud service as well.



I hope this explains the situation and what you should consider going forward.

Answer 5

Your best option to to contact a data recovery specialist. If the hard drive's platters were physically damaged, odds are that the files are not recoverable. But a specialist should be able to determine exactly what was damaged and how that impacts recovery. Keep in mind that this will be expensive, but off the shelf software only works in limited circumstances.

Answer 6

Google it.