Better to Reformat and Recover or Leave As Is

jlarremore

New member
I have a Seagate 2 TB drive that has recently gone bad. It does not click and can be accessed with data recovery tools like Disk Drill and Get Back Data. With Disk Drill it seems to be able to identify data but it's very slow. I started on Sunday and it's Wednesday and I'm only up to 70 GB read.

Would it be better to format the drive (Windows doesn't recognize it and wants to format the bad drive) and then try to recover the data or should I stay on my present course and let Disk Drill find what it can?

I have run Get Back Data for years with a lot of success but never this much data. I'm hoping that when Disk Drill is done I can run GBD and recover more.

Any advice is appreciated.

Jef
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
jlarremore":3qy0p623 said:
[post]18272[/post] Would it be better to format the drive
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NO!!!!!! Never, and anyone who ever suggests you should format a drive to try recovery is a COMPLETE IDIOT!!!
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
I never use Disk Drill, because there are much better programs out there. Maybe the program is just slow. A few other things that might cause speed issues:

1. If you are USB 2.0 connected rather than USB 3.0 or direct SATA. Even if you are in a 3.0 port your Sata to USB adapter might be only 2.0
2. The drive may well have a firmware malfunction. This is especially likely if it is a Grenada drive (e.g. ST2000DM0...)
3. The drive might have bad sectors. A good program will alert to this, but D.D. might not.
 

jlarremore

New member
That's good to know. I usually use Get Back Data. Drive is a SATA drive I removed from the external case and connected to a SATA port internally. No USB. I'll do a test with a different drive on a laptop I have using GBD and see how it differs. I've invested almost a week, but if the results are better and more reliable with GBD, then I'm ok with it.
 

jlarremore

New member
Jared":22s9vuiy said:
I never use Disk Drill, because there are much better programs out there. Maybe the program is just slow. A few other things that might cause speed issues:

1. If you are USB 2.0 connected rather than USB 3.0 or direct SATA. Even if you are in a 3.0 port your Sata to USB adapter might be only 2.0
2. The drive may well have a firmware malfunction. This is especially likely if it is a Grenada drive (e.g. ST2000DM0...)
3. The drive might have bad sectors. A good program will alert to this, but D.D. might not.


Thanks Jared. Things are going smoothly, and slow! I had an extra SATA port in my PC so I connected the bad drive and unplugged the CD drive. Things are going much faster. I'm using Get Back Data. I would say I have about half of the data recovered. That was about a month ago I started. I can't tell you what the malfunction is. It was an external drive but I uncased it and it still isn't recognized, but accessable. How that works is pure magic to me! Thanks for all your help.
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
Seagate drives typically perform a sector size mutation via the USB - SATA bridge board. So Windows can't understand the partition table structure. But, data recovery software typically ignores the sector size and will detect it either way.
 
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