My Seagate 4TB HDD from Dec 2020 has suddenly died, Any suggestions?

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kap'n krunch

kap'n krunch

2K Club - QQ Super Nova
Joined
Nov 25, 2008
Messages
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Erased land
It was the youngest of my backup HDs and the one that was in charge of my "Time Machine" and about 4 days ago Disk Utility said it can't repair it!!!
I hope there is a way to transfer all the info to a new one...
I see all of the reviews on yamazon and there are always a bunch of people whose HD have had an premature death..
Sooo... Seagate, WD....Buffalo... La Cie???
Any help will be welcome...
Thanks in advance!
 
well, the SUN has been acting up lately and we have entered a period when it goes into overdrive regarding sunspots and Earths magnetosphere is in an all time low so if the Sun decides to just fart we are back to the stone age...and then the only MCH music will be us standing around a fireplace and playing guitars or acoustic instruments......
 
Does the partition just not exist? Are you able to mount the drive itself in a HD docking station?

Back in the IDE days, I had a 500gb drive die. It would get extremely hot to the touch. The “solution” was to put it in a freezer bag, throw it in the freezer for a day or two, then throw it in a docking station and recover that way. What a nightmare…
 
kap'n krunch said:
It was the youngest of my backup HDs and the one that was in charge of my "Time Machine" and about 4 days ago Disk Utility said it can't repair it!!!
I hope there is a way to transfer all the info to a new one...
I see all of the reviews on yamazon and there are always a bunch of people whose HD have had an premature death..
Sooo... Seagate, WD....Buffalo... La Cie???
Any help will be welcome...
Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...
For a while it was commonly agreed that Seagate = hot garbage.
I think they've all evolved and are all about equally robust nowadays. At least between the recognizable names. WD, Seagate, Sandisk, Toshiba, Samsung.
I might avoid the generic brands. LaCie have a reputation for bottom of the barrel products.

Should be under warranty, right? Make them send you a new one. They just will without protest. Do you only have one backup volume for this? (ie 2 total copies) If so... don't drop it or kick it! Grab another drive as soon as possible and starting rolling a backup clone. Then when your replacement arrives, now you'll keep 3 total copies! :)

Don't buy anything from Amazon or Best Buy. They sell facsimile products (bootlegs) that are guaranteed to be a bad time.
 
If you can read any of files, or your PC can see its directory structure you stand a chance of getting something off it. I'd get an external HDD docking station, like one of these from StarTech, and try and grab as much as you can off it. But do it file by file, and pause between files, maybe even power it off after a while. I once did it a few years ago, it took a day to get maybe 90% of my files back and it wasn't a big HDD either (250MB I think), always had a back-up since.
 
You may have luck imaging the drive with something like G4U? Freeware drive cloning util

Anyone doing backups should look into some sort of RAID array for redundancy. Modern HD's aren't as robust, unless you buy expensive server grade. Even then a RAID is a good idea.

Good luck!!
 
Dont know your OS but if you can mount it on a Linux PC, or boot yours via bootable USB you can try fsck to fix it, or dd it to another external and see what you end up with.
 
Is this drive a spinning disk HDD technology?
Or it is a FLASH drive technology?

If spinning disk then...
What error message are you seeing with this dead drive?

Did you move the drive prior to it dieing?

If you moved it and power was off, was it then Dead next time you powered it back on?

It's possible the drive head has physically moved out of it's physical working range.
Remove the drive, hold it sideways with both hands firmly and flick your wrists very fast.
Do this a few times then flip the drive over so the sides are in opposite hands and repeat.
What this is doing is making the drive head move inside the drive. The movement should place the drive head back into a recognized location and the drive will boot again.

Good luck,
 
I’d try a different USB cable. Also try connecting to a different device (PC, laptop, etc).
 
1. Is the drive still visible in computer management? That’s going to determine what your options are and what tools might help.
2. As suggested, try a different cable, try a different port, try a different computer to see if the results change.
 
Do check the cable first.

kap'n krunch said:
It was the youngest of my backup HDs...
Click to expand...
If I can read that literally and this was a backup volume, there's no need for a deep dive into recovery desperation. Grab the nearest available drive and clone the primary to it to make a new backup.

If that backup volume was the only backup, get on this quickly!
If you have multiple backups, get on it soon enough. Waiting for a new replacement drive is fine. Put on some coffee even!
 
I've used a program called 'R-Studio' that I purchased year ago. I would guess they are still around, but this program will let you connect to a bad drive and see and recover anything that is on there that hasn't been written over. It's save my but quite a few times over the years. It's slow and tedious but it works. Not sure how it would handle 4TB, that might be quite a chore, but it does work. It's not cheap, I think it was around $80 or so.

I'll see if it still exists

UPDATE: It still does, and it's $49.00!

https://www.r-studio.com/
Check it out
 
I hope you have luck with the data recovery attempt. If looking for new disk, here you have my experience:

I have many HDDs from the first ones, 1TB, to the recent ones 18TB, and have had failures with Samsung and Seagate brands. No failures with Western Digital RED.

After recent survey, one of the more reliable brand is HGST, now acquired by Western Digital. All my new HDDs, since 2019, are HGST Ultrastar 10, 12, 14 and 18 TB. Very happy so far.

But you know this is only statistical numbers. One unit of the best brand may fail in the worst moment.

For your more valuable files, you must always implement a robust contingency plan. Minimum three copies in different media in minimum two different locations/houses.
 
I've had WD Black fail. (The 24/7/365 running enterprise flagship model.) Just sayin.

It's not "if" they fail, it's "when".

Backup clones are the way to go here. WHEN one fails, swap in a new drive and clone it back. Recovery should be a last resort. Curate your files on the primary drive(s) and then clone whole volumes for backup. Doing backups piecemeal manually is asking to screw up and lose something. Especially for system drives! Clone your system drive as soon as you have OS and 3rd party apps installed. You want multiple drives kicking around that will boot your machine and let you repair and get right back to work. Computers have two modes: Computer and paperweight. They're awfully expensive to use as paperweights! Something goes wrong with the only drive that boots your machine? Paperweight mode!

I've still got a copy of Data Rescue. I recovered someone's drive where they erased it a while ago. Hardware failure though... Check out the prices of recovery services! When your eyebrows finally go down again, pay attention to your backups. :)
 
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