So, I was trying to setup this external hard drive to work on someones TV. It wouldn't detect it, and from some simple googling it seemed that reformatting might be required. The drive has basically never been used, had it for a year but it's just sat on my desk. Seemed to work perfectly fine

Mid way through formatting, it crashed. Ever since this point it's seemed to be just entirely borked. It would show as a drive in windows, but anything that would interact with it would take significantly longer to open. Opening "This PC" for example, everything would appear but it would continue to try and load constantly. For over an hour. Right clicking the drive was slow, opening properties took over 30 minutes to open, etc.

At this point I wasn't too sure what was wrong, I tried Windows "error checking" through the properties and it never did anything. Left it for hours, the error checking just stopped responding and never did anything. Device Manager claimed the drive was working fine. I tried using chkdsk and it would tell me the drive was formatted as NTSF, then it would start to check the drive, estimate a time of 999 hours, and then just stop doing anything. I tried to use "Diskpart", but this would never load at all.

I googled to see if there were any good programs that could help fix hard drive errors, and one of the most recommended seemed to be SeaTools for Windows. Considering it's a 4TB external hard drive from Seagate, I figured that should be fine. I tried to perform the "Fix All - Long" test and this just didn't work. It was still 0% many hours later, and was seemingly doing nothing. I clicked abort test, and then tried the "Short Generic" test. This failed fairly quickly and informed me that it was likely due to a bad sector, and that I should perform the "Long Generic" test in attempts to fix said errors.

I started the test, went to bed figuring it would take a long time to perform... Woke up and my windows was back at the login screen. No idea why, doesn't usually happen. Signed in, and now the drive doesn't appear in most locations. Isn't detected as a drive through windows, isn't detected by the SeaTools program.. The only place that seems to detect it is Device Manager.

I can open properties in device manager (Still takes a while), it claims to be working fine still.. If I go to "Volumes", this is what I see



Any ideas or should I just consider it fucked at this point?

Remove drive from enclosure if possible and test it.
If it still acts funny the drives dead.

Do you hear any clicking or "tick tick" sounds. Doesn't it spin up and and stop constantly?

If any of the above, it's dead.

Does Windows Disk Management detect the drive?

More than likely you screwed the drives bios chip during a botched format attempt. Only solution is to buy a new drive or search ebay for the identicle controller board and float the bios from the new board onto the old one. This isnt usually done unless you have data to recover and if you dont have chip reflow experience chances are you'll botch that too

At another company, once had a C-Level pay $40,000 to recover 250GB of data that turned out to be his personal porn collection.

and by personal, I mean like videos of him and his many mistresses... LOL

As someone that does data recovery I find that figure to be absurd.
Dudes lying to you or your straight up embellishing.

Circa 2004

Correction, my wife has reminded me this was 2007
And it is very possible he was embellishing the cost as he had a tendency for the dramatic, though I didn't specifically recall the year, I'm fairly positive he said $40,000



This post was edited by Cactuar_NOM on Mar 22 2019 03:13pm