Louis Rossman on youtube may have a deal for you. This has happened for the last 35 years if not more. Not having a back up wasn't terribly bright. Better go and do it now on any other mobile devices you have.

Caluser2000 wrote:

Not having a back up wasn't terribly bright. Better go and do it now on any other mobile devices you have.

Well this is the curse of living in complete poverty, I have no money to afford anything. The only thing I have been able to use for backups has somehow developed mechanical problems despite not being used strenuously.

USB sticks have been cheap as chips for years and you obvoiusly have other computer kit to play around with.

On instinct I would think this is a firmware issue. I know that's spontaneously occured on a certain infamous line of Barracudas (not the usual mechanical failure)... can't help beyond that.

My old ASUS A6500U just did that a month ago.
If you live in poverty you can't afford a professional. It's crazy expensive.
If the data is irreplacable then you just have to start saving money. You could try DIY but it will probably just make things worse.

leileilol wrote:

On instinct I would think this is a firmware issue. I know that's spontaneously occured on a certain infamous line of Barracudas (not the usual mechanical failure)... can't help beyond that.

Yes, several others have hinted it's the logic board that has somehow failed. I didn't notice any audible signs of head crashing or damage. Assuming the heads didn't damage the platters in any way I guess this just means my data is trapped for now.

Miphee wrote:

If you live in poverty you can't afford a professional. It's crazy expensive.
If the data is irreplacable then you just have to start saving money. You could try DIY but it will probably just make things worse.

DIY is never a course of action with these things. Hard drives are so overly complicated in their design and manufacture, almost feels like they do this on purpose to make people continue to buy these things. I don't really have any other option so I guess I'll just wait for a miracle.

DracoNihil wrote:

DIY is never a course of action with these things. Hard drives are so overly complicated in their design and manufacture, almost feels like they do this on purpose to make people continue to buy these things. I don't really have any other option so I guess I'll just wait for a miracle.

You are very right even though it never stopped me from experimenting with failed drives.
Some success, many failures. I've had a surprising success rate with old clicky Quantum drives but never with notebook drives. When you are desperate enough and can't afford a backup service you'll do anything to get the data back somehow.

Most HDD failures I've seen have been without any warning signs.

DracoNihil wrote:

Well this is the curse of living in complete poverty, I have no money to afford anything.

Then why are you asking this?:

DracoNihil wrote:

Do I have a chance to recover this in the hands of a professional?

Data recovery done professionally is much much more expensive than hard drives.

Besides you obviously have internet, so surely you can backup your most important data at least to a cloud storage provider?

ZellSF wrote:

Besides you obviously have internet, so surely you can backup your most important data at least to a cloud storage provider?

Most of them require monthly payment plans or otherwise offer way too little space for what I need. On top of this, that also means placing my trust in a company and I already had one too many scares after using DropBox. I prefer to have backups that I actually possess on my person and not have to trust a third party with.

Miphee wrote:

I've had a surprising success rate with old clicky Quantum drives but never with notebook drives. When you are desperate enough and can't afford a backup service you'll do anything to get the data back somehow.

Well these old harddrives weren't necessarily trying to shove a huge amount of data onto one small place at a time and probably weren't as tightly integrated or overly engineered for that matter. As much as it'd be interesting for me to experiment I don't really have the tools for it anyhow.

So what drive is it? Maybe someone can donate a logic board or something

It's a WD Blue. 5400 RPM.

1.0TB WD10JPCX - 24UE4T0

5VDC: 0.55A
R/N: 771933
DCX: DU0LE8S40
DCM: SHKT2BK
Date: 29 NOV 2014

Serial #: WXB1E84D0CLU

DracoNihil wrote:

otherwise offer way too little space for what I need.

You would have a backup of some of the stuff you can't afford losing, rather than none of it, which is your current situation. I'm sure you could easily get 50 GB for free on cloud storage providers, so what is it that you have that is so irreplaceable that's more than 50GB?

DracoNihil wrote:

that also means placing my trust in a company

That's not how backups work. That's one of the fundamental rules of backups; verify them once in a while. If they fail, make a new backup. Never trust. The chances of your primary storage failing at the exact same time as your backup failing is pretty low.

Ideally you would have two backups to eliminate that risk too, but that's usually not very realistic (certainly not in this case).

keropi wrote:

So what drive is it? Maybe someone can donate a logic board or something

Even identical disc drive models might have differences in their logic board, so it's not certain a logic board replacement would work. There's a small risk of losing the data that way, and he supposedly can't afford that.

We have all been here. I'd say 9 times out of 10 it gets put down as a learning experience and move on, forced clear out if you like.

a 2nd copy of your data anywhere is better then nothing, even an old laptop or PC with lots of old hard drives attached is still better then nothing. Even if its less reliable then your actual laptop the it's not very likely both will fail at the exact same time.

We're all human and I think we've all lost data before. Right now at this moment, my backup situation isn't ideal.

I had an old SCSI 10K Seagate that after being stored had trouble spinning up. However, it did eventually start running again.
I also had a few IDE drives fail this way (while in an active machine), all at different times but all on the same PSU. That PSU was junk and may have contributed to the failures. I still have one of those drives and it seems to work again, years later.

In your case, I wonder if the motor has gotten weak and can't muster enough power to spin up anymore. The phrasing of your post makes it sound like it didn't get shut down very often, so when it did get shut down, the issue with restarting was a surprise.
Hopefully that's what the problem is. I think mechanical trouble with spinning up is one of the most recoverable situations you can have.
If it's spinning up but then shutting down because it can't find track 0 or something, that's a lot worse.

Assuming you're comfortable in linux:
I would hook up the drive externally to a linux box, with a fan nearby. If you can ever get it to spin up, use 'ddrescue' to start imaging it somewhere. It's designed for recovering an image from dodgy disks, and has some intelligence about how it does it. Read the man page, make sure you use the option to use a log file. ddrescue can resume the recovery in multiple sessions, and it will use the log file to keep track of which parts of the disk have already been recovered so it doesn't waste time (or mechanical stress) on anything redundant.

Sometimes having a fan to keep the drive cool will help it to keep running instead of locking up as it heats. That might not be an issue here but I'd prefer to have a fan ready in this situation.

Aggressive/risky:
Drives that struggle to spin up sometimes respond to being judiciously "tapped". Use your judgment.

This is risky, and kind of a weird idea that I've never actually tried before.
Assuming your problem is that the motor mechanically can't spin up the disk. If you think that's not the problem, then ignore.
But I wonder if providing a high voltage on the appropriate voltage line to the drive would help the motor to spin up the disk. You'd need to be handy with electronics and provide a separate, independent power supply to the drive that isn't going to anywhere else. Per ATX specs it can legally be up to 5% high, but this includes ripple, so to be within spec the reading you'd see on a multimeter would still be less than that.
If you actually attempt this, and have the means to adjust the voltage, then it's up to you how far to push it.
On a desktop drive I assume the motor would be driven from +12V, but I'm not sure if laptop drives use +12V. I don't remember.

If you still think it has any chance of starting up on it's own, or if you're considering professional recovery, then don't do anything that might hurt the drive.

shamino wrote:

In your case, I wonder if the motor has gotten weak and can't muster enough power to spin up anymore. The phrasing of your post makes it sound like it didn't get shut down very often, so when it did get shut down, the issue with restarting was a surprise.
Hopefully that's what the problem is. I think mechanical trouble with spinning up is one of the most recoverable situations you can have.
If it's spinning up but then shutting down because it can't find track 0 or something, that's a lot worse.

I can't really tell what it's doing because when it gives up, the SATA port ends up thinking there's nothing actually plugged into the slot.

All I can hear is it sounding like it's powering on, then it shuts off aprox. two and a half seconds later.

Had that happen on a Seagate Constellation-series hard drive, it would spin up, click a few times (seek test?) then shut down, well, I wound up RMAing it, but the story does not end here.

New drive received, it worked for about 5 days before it started doing the same as the first one: spin up, click 5-9 times then shut down just like the first one. Rinse and repeat.

And I just had a different one (an old-as-dirt 1TB HGST) do that as well, it shut down and never turned on again. Bummer.

Is there anything for SATA devices that's like a "POST test card" for PC's so I can atleast, beable to read what's happening at the controller/firmware level?

DracoNihil wrote:

Is there anything for SATA devices that's like a "POST test card" for PC's so I can atleast, beable to read what's happening at the controller/firmware level?

There's a serial communications connector on them, but I have no idea how to intelligently diagnose anything with it. Maybe there's info on the internet about that.
I only messed with that once, a long time ago. It was on a couple of those notorious Seagate (7200.11?12?) drives that had a firmware bug, causing them to brick themselves at a young age. The procedure to fix those involved connecting to the serial connector and issuing some commands to the drive. But I didn't know what I was doing, I was just following instructions that somebody else had worked out for that particular failure.

To communicate over that connector, a separate USB adapter was required because it doesn't use the same signal voltage levels as a PC serial port. At the time, they were on eBay for a few bucks.