Hard Drive Failure: A Hoax?

[jacky.alcine]

I don't know why I didn't come to the forums to begin with. So currently I'm running e2fsck in interactive mode because my 320 GB Seagate Expansion Portable Drive S/N (2GH473GA), P/N (9SD2A3-500) has stopped cooperating.

Current S.M.A.R.T Data Status:

Reallocated Sector Count: Threshold, 36. Value: 2,076 sectors.
Current Pending Sector Count: Threshold, 0. Value: 33 sectors.

I can't find any warranty information regarding my data, as I've lost the receipt a month and a half ago, and this drive is of fair age (approximately two months old). Currently e2fsck is having me answer questions like:
http://paste.ubuntu.com/554646/. Mind you, that's probably an eighth of the output.

Should I continue with e2fsck or is it time to call it quits and throw in the toilet?

This drive had everything on it, my work, my personal files, configurations, software, everything. If there's anyone who's willing to help; please reply as soon as possible.

[jacky.alcine]

e2fsck is running with the -y flag, so I don't have to keep pushing y.

[James78]

I'd just say that because you have advance warning of a potential problem, just watch out. Your hard drive may fail tomorrow, it may not fail for 3 more years, but either way, since you know something may be up, I'd suggest you always keep a up to date backup of your most important stuff (e.g. configurations, list of software installed, maybe your home folder, movies, music ..). Two months old.. I have to admit that's pretty quick for something like this to be happening to a drive.

If it helps, I have a drive that's similar to that. It's still running great, but I'm not holding data on it without backing it up. It's in a RAID. If the drive goes, I still have my data.

[jacky.alcine]

Will do, James78. I think after (God forbid) this dies, I'll invest in a dedicated server just for my backups.

[IcarusR]

If you need to RMA it you used to be able to go to seagate website & do it by serial number.

Yet another example of how blasé people have become when backups are concerned !!

[gradinaruvasile]

Watch out for errors like that. I have 2 drives with errors on them and if the os wants to read the affected zone, it freezes the computer (plugging them out/in from theit sata connectors regains control). But if you happen to have bad sectors in the first part of the partition, it may become unmountable.

[efflandt]

See what seagate.com has for Seatools, if they have a version that can boot from CD if you do not still have Windows.

When I had bad sector problems with a WD laptop drive, they could tell it was under warranty from manufacture date of that serial number, so I did not have to dig up the receipt. Not sure how gentle my boss' grandsons were with it.

[knedle]

Hello,
you may try to use DD Rescue, which is pretty nice program, that helped me few times. You will probably not be able to get all your data back (I'm pretty sure you should get back something about 90% of your data), but 90% is much better than 0%.

First you will need another drive, go to shop and get one. If I were you I would buy anything cheap, as long as it is not Seagate*.

Then you will have to create partitions with the same size (or slightly bigger) that you have on your broken drive. Reason for this is you will be copying everything from your damaged drive to new one (so not only data, but also free space). Now if your source partition is 100,1GB and your destination partition happens to be 100,0999GB data will not fit, but if you create partition with size od 100,2GB, you will waste a little of free space, but it will fit for sure. For creating partitions you can use whatever you are comfortable with, it may be fdisk, gparted or anything else. Partitions doesn't have to be in the same order as on source drive.

Third step is to execute

dd_rescue /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1

where /dev/sdb1 is your source partition, /dev/sdc1 is destionation.

Now you have your partition copied to your new drive (if you have more partitions remember to copy them all). You can go to seagate.com, send them your HDD (you don't need any invoice for that, just a serial number that should be written on your drive), and once they give you new one, you can ebay it.

* Yeah, I know that any HDD can be broken and it may be Seagate, Samsung, WD, or anything else. But in past years I had to deal with a lot of broken dives and majority of them were Seagates, when my company switched to Samsungs and WDs our problems with HDDs become less frequent. So just make yourself a favor and don't use Seagate drives if you like your files.

[jacky.alcine]

Thank you everyone for replying so swiftly!

Seagate does have software that attempts to repair, but it doesn't do anything. It's practically a chkdsk on Windows.

But I am making progress. Using deductive reasoning, I found the area on the drive where the issue being caused. Would the following command:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb9 bs=4k

do anything for me?

[CharlesA]

That will just overwrite the drive with zeros.

If you run the seagate utility, it should be able to see if there are problems on the drive, so you can RMA it.