I am new to the forums and new to OpenSuse. I have a Seagate drive that has data on it and it is making a clicking noise. The drive has not been formatted. Windows doesn’t recognize the drive and I thought maybe I would try Linux. I was thinking if I could either install OpenSuse and perform the attempted recovery OR create a OpenSuse live DVD and boot off of the DVD to attempt the recovery. I could create a bootable USB drive and boot off that too.
Regardless of which media I use to boot, I am not sure what to do after that. Since I am not familiar with Linux, I am not sure if OpenSuse will recognize the drive or not.
I probably won’t be the only one saying this, but if your drive is making clicking noises, it’s time for a new drive. Period. A couple of years back I had the same problem and spent hours trying to find a way to “fix” it. All for nought and not worth the time. It’s unfortunate for you that it happened now rather than just before “Black Friday” or “Boxing Day”. At least you could have bought a new drive at a very low cost.
Like the other poster, I don’t have any hopes for you. A clicking sound mostly means the heads have touched the disks surface. But, if you want to give it a try, download a Tumbleweed live image, write it to USB disk, boot from it. YaST’s partitioner should see the disk. If it doesn’t it’s end of story for us.
Old school rescue, put it in the freezer (don’t know for how long, but maybe over the night). Then use a live distro like Tumbleweed to copy data, most important first before disk totally out of order.
The freezer worked for me on couple of drives. I used parted magic which has all the needed tools to mount on the fly and connected the drive externally and I was able to extract the data. I was lucky. So good luck to you.
I agree. In my experience there’s a remote chance that some of the tricks above may work temporarily, in particular the freezer trick.
HOWEVER… even if you do get the drive to read you should get any data you care about backed up immediately. Don’t wait 'til after you check your email or whatever. One of the characteristics of that media is that any tear or bubble on the surface of the disk tends to grow rather rapidly whenever the drive is spinning. I’ve seen “clicking” drives work, but they always fail soon. Sometimes it takes a month, sometimes a week, more likely minutes. Do not attempt to use that drive to store anything, as the surface media is certainly damaged. Dispose of the drive.
There is one more trick that sometimes works. Most likely it won’t and the odds are just as good that you will damage the drive even worse, so it should only be used as an absolute last resort.
Remove the drive. There is a label on the drive. The top of the label is the “top” of the drive.
Hold the drive in your right hand with the “top” nearest the palm of your hand and the label facing you.
Gently swing the drive and strike the edge of the lower right hand corner on the heel of your left hand, just once.
On rare occasions this can free a stuck actuator arm (the other possible source of the clicking noise).
Sorry, but this reminds me of the “Did you try shaking it, worked for my car” remark from a friend years ago. I shaked the broken harddisk, put it back in the PC and it worked. For five minutes. “About the same as my car”. :D.
Seriously: the freezer trick sometimes, read sometimes, can work. The bare metal shrinks a couple of nanometres and the disk can rotate properly. In those rare cases it can help to get data back from a disk that was unreadable before, but don’t be surprised to end up with corrupted files and folders.
On Mon, 09 Jan 2017 15:56:01 +0000, quinness wrote:
> Old school rescue, put it in the freezer (don’t know for how long, but
> maybe over the night). Then use a live distro like Tumbleweed to copy
> data, most important first before disk totally out of order.
I’ve had some success with this going back to pre-IDE days.
First rule: have everything ready to roll as soon as you plug the old
drive in - don’t let it run any longer than necessary. Personally, I use
a USB adapter so that I can hot-plug the drive ( the adapter I use
handles pretty much any drive interface going way back ;-). Some older
drives heat up pretty fast once power is applied and heat is your enemy!
I have seen cases where people have resorted to ice or even dry ice withe
the whole mess in an insulated bag during recovery ;-}
I too thought it was crazy, but then I tried it. Of the roughly 100 drives I ever tried it on (as a last resort only) over the course over a dozen years it did work 3 times. Not great odds, but when all else has failed WTH. Those three drives never worked for long though, hours at the most.
FWIW, I got the suggestion from an engineer employed at a hard rive manufacturer. His job was designing hard drives.
i’d echo that when you hear a “typical” clicking sound, there’s not likely going to be any solution.
You can try the freezer trick, but I’d guess that works less than 20% of the time.
I’m in the process of attempting to replace the electronic card for a drive with a very distinctive sound, it’s unmistakable that the arms are whacking at the mechanical limits… It’s very different than the typical clicking of a failed drive. With fingers crossed, an electronics card failure is supposed to be one of the rarest but easiest to fix solutions.
Needless to say, once you have a mechanical failure, it’s important not to keep running the drive causing more damage.
I have a PC which I built myself using a Gigabyte Motherboard (GA-A75M-DS2) which says dual bios on the motherboard (whatever that means), and a 1TB Seagate HDD (ST1000DM003). I don’t recall the age, but probably at least 4 years. I live in Asia where it’s hot and humid, on average probably 1 brown-out every day, with no UPS protection. I love the Gigabyte. Most sturdy motherboard I’ve ever owned, in this climate. The UPS got busted in a flood, and I never really had enough cash to buy a good replacement. The PC runs 24/7. I’m running Leap 4.3. Format is XFS.
One day I seemed to get a message from the Gigabyte asking me to copy the ROM Code when booting. But I don’t now recall exactly what it said. I trusted it and said OK. Boot and running went fine. But on the next boot it appears the first boot sectors of the hard disk were overwritten with zeros. No idea if this was as a result of the previous action or not. But seems likely. The booting sequence, after looking for the HDD just hangs around there then reverts to the DVD and will boot from that. So it looks like a busted disk.
Well it would be very helpful if I could somehow access the drive and recover the data on the disk. Everything would be great, but at least my personal folder with my data, at the very least.
I subsequently came over this list of software, https://www.colormango.com/utilities/data-recovery-file-repair/index.html?filter3=XFS-Recovery, which put USF Explorer Professional Recovery top and Stellar Phoenix Linux Data Recovery 2nd. I could imagine that could well be because of the large number of formats supported by USF Explorer. Of course I’d prefer ease of use, first and foremost, but I don’t object to getting into the nitty gritty if the outcome is going to be better.
Also. How do I copy a complete XFS drive to a second drive, so that I’m not working on my original drive?
@stubble,
First, it’s bad form to append your problem to another’s thread. It’s unlikely that the possible solutions to your problem have anything to do with the original topic of the thread… So, always start a new thread for anything you want to ask about. If you really feel something in another thread could be relevant, you can reference that other thread in your own thread.
As for your Q…
As gogalthorp recommends, dd is a basic and reliable tool. But, as powerful as it is, there aren’t any safeguards. You might prefer installing your drive as a secondary in another machine, booting up in that other OS and running something like Clonezilla.
But, before you do even that
You should probably see whether something simple can solve your problem, like re-writing your MBR.
And, try to find out whether your mystery Gigabyte write was a BIOS ROM flash update… If this is what you did, then your hard drive problems are likely unrelated.
BTW - As long as I’m posting in this thread, people might like to know of an update to my previous post… I replaced the disk board and found that the disk would boot for a few minutes… Then fail. But, After waiting awhile (disk cool down? Clearing buffers?) I could run the disk again for a few more minutes. Bottom line is that I was able to eventually get all the data off that disk.