Big scary Raw SMART value, is my drive dying?! The other week I noticed this post on superuser.com: 4295032833, now that is a big scary number! That’s a lot of timeout errors! Does this mean this drive is bad or even dying? Then how come the normalized values seem to indicate that nothing’s wrong? Some… Read More »
I notice much nonsense online about bad sector reallocation on hard drives while in essence it is quite simple: Conditions for sector reallocation are: Non-recovered write errors When a write operation can not be completed after the Error Recovery Procedure (ERP) is fully carried out, the sector(s) are reallocated to the spare location. An error is… Read More »
A passport is how a drive ID’s itself. This simple utility tries, via various methods to determine a drive’s ID and serial number. Sometimes it is for example useful to know which hard drive is actually used inside a USB external drive enclosure (external hard drive). For example to learn if the drive is a… Read More »
It often goes like this. Your PC is acting weird, sluggish. You can’t put your finger on it. Someone, maybe in an online forum, suggests you may have hard disk problems. The term bad sectors is used. Windows Event Viewer may refer to a bad block. It is then suggested to look at the disk’s… Read More »
Just a quick heads up, beta for HD Sentinel 5.01.5 is available here: www.hdsentinel.com/beta5/hdsentinel_pro_setup_5015-jjmfl.zip – detection of NVMe SSD status when Intel chipset RAID controller driver installed: detect complete status of standalone NVMe SSDs and NVMe SSDs configured as RAID (Intel Z270 chipset) – added detection of complete disk status when ASMEDIA ASM1352R external USB… Read More »
We give away 10 lifetime HD Sentinel Pro licenses (value $29.95)! We’ll give away a license every 10 likes! Ended! As we have 10 licenses to give away, we reached out goal! We will draw winners later today and announce them on our FB page. Thank you all!!!! What do you have to do? Visit… Read More »
“Can my data be recovered using file recovery software if ..” , or, “can I recover my data after ..” is the most common type of pre-sale question I get. In this article I focus on Windows file systems (FAT(32) and NTFS). Note: In this article we will assume the disk is physically intact: It spins… Read More »
How to Triage a Hard Drive Guide for Technicians With data recovery, your main goal is to get the patient drive cloned/imaged to a healthy drive or image file. If you cannot do this with relative ease, it is, for sure, a sign that something is wrong with the drive. In order to allow us… Read More »
Using DiskPatch you can repair bad sectors very much like a utility like Spinrite but without the hocus-pocus-factor. Hard disk diagnostics using SMART DiskPatch (DIY DataRecovery.nl) includes a S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic utility. Since DiskPatch runs from a boot USB key it can even check disk health if the PC fails to boot. To create a DiskPatch… Read More »
EDIT august 2019: Look at the number of issues with locked external WD disks. If your enclosure ever breaks, you’ll lose all data on the disk. With a non encrypted disk you’d just open enclosure and move the disk to a new enclosure and all would be okay. NOT with those encrypting WD external drives.… Read More »