A Record of a Tortuous Hard Drive Data Recovery Journey

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 20:22:05 +0800

TL;DR / Geek Summary:

Disaster Recovery: Rescuing data from a failing second-hand Seagate drive with RAW partitions and climbing S.M.A.R.T C5 counts.

Toolstack: Tested DiskGenius (failed due to unstable crack) and R-Studio (successful image export with 10% data loss).

Critical Lesson: Redundancy is not optional. Hardware clicks signify immediate mechanical failure; tap-to-read is a last-resort desperation hack.

# Introduction

As one of the most frequently used storage devices, computer hard drives are often taken for granted. Most of the time, to save money, people choose not to buy a second hard drive to back up their data. They only regret it when the hard drive can no longer be read. At that point, you have to bear huge risks, and even swallow the bitter pill if the recovered data turns out to be incomplete. You might end up paying 10 times the price of your current hard drive just to recover the data, and sometimes it even leads to disputes.

# How It All Started

I bought a second-hand hard drive on Taobao. It was a used Seagate drive. At the time, I had no idea that such a terrifying scenario was about to unfold.

Back then, I went “all-in” and dumped all my data onto this single drive. Plus, the drive was second-hand. The disaster debuffs were fully stacked.

# It Happened Two Years Later

One day, right when I connected it to my computer, I suddenly found that the partition had turned into RAW format, and I noticed that the S.M.A.R.T C5 value (Current Pending Sector Count) of the hard drive was climbing.

I panicked instantly, thinking that recovering this mountain of data would cost more money than I even had.

I searched for two data recovery software programs and found their cracked versions:

DiskGenius Cracked Professional Edition

R-Studio Cracked Edition

But there were some twists and turns.

The DiskGenius crack was incomplete; it crashed shortly after I opened it.

After opening R-Studio, I didn’t experience any crashes. I immediately went to create an image of my failing hard drive, and fortunately, the entire image was successfully exported in the end.

However, after extracting the data from the image, I found 40 bad sectors, and about 10% of my data was lost.

Data Status

# Stepping into the Pit Again

The ordeal above wasn’t over yet.

I mentioned earlier that I had actually bought two drives. I put the recovered data onto the other drive, and for some inexplicable reason, I deleted the exported image file.

Later, this second drive failed even harder than the first one—it went straight into the “click of death” (clicking hard drive).

As soon as I realized something was wrong with the drive, I immediately cut the power. I continuously tapped the hard drive with my hand, and surprisingly, the drive suddenly became readable again.

I immediately started exporting the data. This time, I decisively avoided using that previous hard drive, but unfortunately, 60% of my data had already been lost by now.

Ultimately, 20% of the data was exported before the drive started clicking again. But this time, the drive was completely dead.

I found that a large portion of that 20% recovered data was corrupted. Suddenly, I remembered some materials I had backed up previously—they were all the critical files. Eventually, I found a third hard drive and successfully merged the materials together.

# Afterword

You MUST back up your data! You MUST back up! The most important things inside a hard drive are your memories. If this data is gone, it’s like having your memories erased.