Good afternoon everyone. I have a 6TB HGST Deskstar HDD, model # HDN726060ALE610 and a Sabrent EC-DFLT hard-drive dock.
I was reformatting my laptop this morning and installing drivers when I decided I would check to see if there was a driver update for my hard drive dock. I usually only turn on my hard drive dock when I am moving backups from my laptop prior to reformats. It was working fine and I successfully transferred the contents of my desktop, downloads, etc. to one folder and transferred that folder to my deskstar HDD. I believe it is about 50GB. Not necessarily life-changing, but very inconvenient to lose.
Now when I was getting ready to do the driver update (https://www.sabrent.com/download/ds-ublk-firmware-update/) I missed that text above the columns that says: Remove your Hard Drive from the Docking Station before you run this Firmware Update. I assumed that by following the readme PDF included in the .zip file, that I would not be missing anything. Keep in mind that I have never had a hard drive fail on me in my life so I did not realize that updating a HDD dock driver with the HDD still attached may not be a good idea.
Anyhow, I read through the PDF (which makes no mention to removing any attached HDDs), and flash the driver update. It says to turn the dock off and back on again after finishing. I notice that I do not see my hard drive anymore. I wonder if the driver update messed something up and so I turned it off, restarted the computer, and then turned it back on again. After some Googling I found someone with the same dock who could not recognize his HDD (https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/usb-3-0-sata-hard-drive-not-recognized-windows-10.2809267/). I messed around with the Device Manager and determined we did not have the same issue (uninstalled the driver, "safely ejected", reconnected to see if driver would reinstall).
This is around the time I figure I should call Sabrent. The customer service lady asked me why I did a driver update when the dock was working fine (don't fix something that isn't broken). She then said that I shouldn't have flashed the driver update with the HDD still attached. This is when I realized I might have bricked my HDD. I started Googling some more, talked with HGST who said they could RMA the HDD, but they do not deal with data recovery. After searching around some more, I found the DataRecovery subreddit which led me to Jared's post https://www.data-medics.com/forum/h...ive-with-bad-sectors-using-ddrescue-t133.html about cloning a hard drive with bad sectors using ddrescue.
I do not know exactly what I did to my HDD so that my laptop no longer recognizes it. I tested other hard drives and they are recognized so I know it is not the dock that is the issue. I am fairly confident that it was the driver update as the HDD stopped showing up right after the update however. I took a look using testdisk and it does pull up what was on my deskstar. This is what confuses me, it seems like all of my data is intact. Unfortunately, testdisk is too slow and, after doing some more research, may be risky - definitely something I should not do before cloning the deskstar. It was suggested that I post my issue here so I could try and narrow down what I could have done to my drive and how I might try to "fix" it.
As far as I can tell, the drive looks the same as it was before the driver update. It was not dropped, or overwritten with data/windows. I plan to follow Jared's steps for ddrescue later tonight, but wanted to post this first so I might have some direction/tips before I start. I'm not even sure if the deskstar has "bad sectors" honestly. If I have learned anything today, it is to have multiple backups of ALL my data. Thank you for reading my post.
I was reformatting my laptop this morning and installing drivers when I decided I would check to see if there was a driver update for my hard drive dock. I usually only turn on my hard drive dock when I am moving backups from my laptop prior to reformats. It was working fine and I successfully transferred the contents of my desktop, downloads, etc. to one folder and transferred that folder to my deskstar HDD. I believe it is about 50GB. Not necessarily life-changing, but very inconvenient to lose.
Now when I was getting ready to do the driver update (https://www.sabrent.com/download/ds-ublk-firmware-update/) I missed that text above the columns that says: Remove your Hard Drive from the Docking Station before you run this Firmware Update. I assumed that by following the readme PDF included in the .zip file, that I would not be missing anything. Keep in mind that I have never had a hard drive fail on me in my life so I did not realize that updating a HDD dock driver with the HDD still attached may not be a good idea.
Anyhow, I read through the PDF (which makes no mention to removing any attached HDDs), and flash the driver update. It says to turn the dock off and back on again after finishing. I notice that I do not see my hard drive anymore. I wonder if the driver update messed something up and so I turned it off, restarted the computer, and then turned it back on again. After some Googling I found someone with the same dock who could not recognize his HDD (https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/usb-3-0-sata-hard-drive-not-recognized-windows-10.2809267/). I messed around with the Device Manager and determined we did not have the same issue (uninstalled the driver, "safely ejected", reconnected to see if driver would reinstall).
This is around the time I figure I should call Sabrent. The customer service lady asked me why I did a driver update when the dock was working fine (don't fix something that isn't broken). She then said that I shouldn't have flashed the driver update with the HDD still attached. This is when I realized I might have bricked my HDD. I started Googling some more, talked with HGST who said they could RMA the HDD, but they do not deal with data recovery. After searching around some more, I found the DataRecovery subreddit which led me to Jared's post https://www.data-medics.com/forum/h...ive-with-bad-sectors-using-ddrescue-t133.html about cloning a hard drive with bad sectors using ddrescue.
I do not know exactly what I did to my HDD so that my laptop no longer recognizes it. I tested other hard drives and they are recognized so I know it is not the dock that is the issue. I am fairly confident that it was the driver update as the HDD stopped showing up right after the update however. I took a look using testdisk and it does pull up what was on my deskstar. This is what confuses me, it seems like all of my data is intact. Unfortunately, testdisk is too slow and, after doing some more research, may be risky - definitely something I should not do before cloning the deskstar. It was suggested that I post my issue here so I could try and narrow down what I could have done to my drive and how I might try to "fix" it.
As far as I can tell, the drive looks the same as it was before the driver update. It was not dropped, or overwritten with data/windows. I plan to follow Jared's steps for ddrescue later tonight, but wanted to post this first so I might have some direction/tips before I start. I'm not even sure if the deskstar has "bad sectors" honestly. If I have learned anything today, it is to have multiple backups of ALL my data. Thank you for reading my post.