Questions about recovering Seagate ST4000DM005

[Mago]

Hi, I was reading the guide about how to clone a HDD with bad sectors using ddrescue, and I have a couple of questions.

First the backgroud.

My HDD was working fine until couple of days ago, there was a power outage and after that I noticed couple of hiccups, the drive isn't the primary disk so it wasn't that noticeable. Next day after Windows began to randomly stuck on some process I decided to use CCleaner and check the disks with windows tool. CCleaner went with no problems and the disk check only worked on primary SSD disk, found no issues. On the HDD it couldn't finish and the partitions began to dissapear or neither show the size or space available. Some rebots later, the disk was being shown correctly but when trying to access it only shows some folders and then disconnects. Managed to check the S.M.A.R.T and the C5 and C6 are bad, can't remember the count, after this I unplugged the disk from the pc.

I found out that I can attempt to do a clone/image of the disk and ordered another Seagate Barracuda of same size (ST4000DMZ04, which I found out just now, I might be regreting it, since they are SMR, and hopefully is actually the same size/sector)

So my questions:

1) Is that guide/method the one I should follow in my case?
2) I was thinking on doing drive to drive, but if I understood correctly, imaging first is the safest option, right? In the case of imaging, I need the source disk, the destination disk of the image, and a 3rd disk that can hold the restoration of the image with R-Studio?
3) If done only drive to drive, then no need of 3rd hdd and R-studio?
4) The source has 3 partitions, the destination would be brand new, how would the paths work in this case? I read in the guide that the proccess is going to fail if the tables or the system files are not correct.
5) After the first pass of drive to drive, should I do/check something else before attempting more passes or a reverse?

Thanks for your help.


Update: After posting this, I read more about SMR, and I don't think it will be good for my workflow. I wasn't able to cancel the ST4000DMZ04 but might able to return it and get a WD40EZRZ instead, storage size is listed the same, what else should I look for to be sure I would be able to clone on it?

 

[Jared]

1. The guide should still work. DDrescue is a raw copy tool that's able to work fairly well with drives that have bad sectors. You also might consider trying HDDSuperClone. It's a newer Linux tool, with a GUI that is also quite good.
2. Whether you image to a file or do a drive-to-drive clone is the same risk level. There's no advantage to using a file over drive-to-drive other than ease of copying to another workstation later on, ability to store more than one image on a single large drive, etc.
3. Depending on where the bad sectors are, you might still need to do data recovery using R-Studio or another program after the imaging is complete. You might get a complete read of the MFT and other metadata and the partitions will just mount, or you might not.
4. DDRescue, when used on the disk level (e.g. /dev/sdb) will image the partition table as well. So your new drive will end up partitioned the same as the old one was. Just be sure not to only image the partition (e.g. /dev/sdb1) by adding any numbers to the device ID. Some people make the mistake of imaging a partition to a disk and end up with a drive that has no partition table (which every OS requires). Even so, data recovery software will still work against the copy.
5. I suppose that depends on how the first pass goes.

As to your concerns about SMR, it will work to image to an SMR drive, however, it'll end up slow after some time. I've seen speeds drop from 180Mb/s down to less than 20Mb/s in drive-to-drive copy processes. So if you do image to an SMR drive, you may find it necessary to occasionally pause and allow the drive to catch up on its shingling. That way it'll clear its cache and be ready for more data.

 

[Mago]

5. I suppose that depends on how the first pass goes.

Thanks for answering!

As how it went... I used HDDSuperClone, default settings.
It finished the process with 8 skips (Base skip size 2.10MB) 1 Slow skip, 88 Bad sectors (7/0.000001%)

I exported the log, domain file, and saved the project.

What should I try to do now? Haven't checked the new disk, I'm unsure if I close HHDSuperClone now, I will have to restart the whole process again.

 

[Jared]

No, you'd just need to re-open the project file and you can resume where you left off. But, if you are using a Linux live build without persistent storage, the file might not really exist anywhere but in RAM. Just be sure you actually have a copy of that project file you created.

Seems that the vast majority of data was read, so it's probably a good chance it might just mount.

 

[Mago]

Seems that the vast majority of data was read, so it's probably a good chance it might just mount.

What should I do if the clone didn't mount, and is not being shown at disk management on windows?

The drive is brand new, (WD 4TB) but when it arrived I had problems with it. It wasn't shown directly on windows, but was shown at disk management as not being correctly formated, then had problems with formating. At Linux had no problems when selecting it as destination.


Edit: nvm, is mounted now. I think I didn't connected it right.

Any way I can find what data was loss or what else can I attempt to recover/fix from the bad hdd ?

 

[Jared]

I'm afraid free tools don't provide any way to correlate what files the unread sectors belong to. That's getting into the realm of professional data recovery systems costing thousands.