Hard drive dead?

Note: You need to provide more information for anyone to be able to help you more!

Assumptions:

• You are recovering data from a HDD which has a Windows 7 OS installed on it i.e. likely has NTFS partitions on it.

• You are attempting to recover this data on your Ubuntu System

Other information you could provide:

• Assuming the hard drive in question is /dev/sdc try to update your question with the output from the following commands (you did not use sudo when you ran your commands!):

  sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc
  sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdc
  sudo parted /dev/sdc print
  sudo dd if=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=2 | xxd
  

• A Screen-shot of the partition layout got using Gparted would be useful for diagnosis. On ubuntu I believe you can install gparted using:

  sudo apt-get install gparted
  

• Additional information you can provide on the sound the Hard drive is making would be useful in diagnosis: Disk spin up, Disk activity when using dd to read from the disk, repetitive clicking sounds from the Hard drive.

Recommendations:

• Image the HDD first using ddrecue (ddrescue man page) or dd. Depending on what is wrong with the HDD the more time you spend with it powered on the more likely you risk losing all data. Ideally you want to focus on imaging it and then working on the recovery directly on the image of the HDD. This is especially true for mechanically damaged HDD. You can install ddrescue on ubuntu with:

  sudo apt-get install gddrescue
  

• If you must try recovery without creating an image then first try to mount partitions on the HDD as read-only

  mkdir /tmp/mnt1 /tmp/mnt2
  sudo mount -o ro /dev/sdc1 /tmp/mnt1
  sudo mount -o ro /dev/sdc2 /tmp/mnt2
  

• Try to use disk recovery tools like Testdisk

  sudo testdisk /dev/sdc
  

• If you believe it is a firmware issue try updating your drive with the firmware available for your drive at: http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/213891en. You can use either the ISO or the Windows executable to update your firmware (also see the instructions on the same page).

Notes:

• fdisk only reads your partition table located at the beginning of your drive (within the first 512 bytes). If it doesn't return any information it means your partition table is not readable (either because it has been wiped clean or because it is not readable because of a hardware problem)

• ddrecue and dd do almost the same thing. They read block by block from the disk. ddrescue is useful for recovery as it can be controlled more then dd. For example you can tailor which areas on the disk you want to recover first and ignore bad areas which cause your hard drive to lock up.

• Always connect the HDD directly using SATA connector to your motherboard. Don't use a USB to Sata Adapter to connect your HDD via USB.

IF you hear a scraping noise when you power up the drive, the heads have impacted the platter and recovery is likely a lost cause.

If you here a repeated clicking noise, this means the drive is having trouble reading a particular sector and is retrying. You are hearing the heads seeking over and over. Recovery is possible.

If you hear nothing but the whir of the platters spinning Recovery is possible.

If you hear nothing at all, (i.e. the drive isn't spinning) you can try getting the spindle started or freezing the drive as outlined in heynnema answer and if successful, continue on from here.

If the device in question is:

Model Family:     Seagate Barracuda 7200.12
Device Model:     ST3750528AS
Serial Number:    6VP2NFKJ

It's possible that this problem was brought on by faulty firmware or a failed attempt to upgrade the firmware

You can determine the firmware version of a drive with the command sudo smartctl -x /dev/sdd | grep -i firmware (Change /dev/sdd to the device in question.)

Edit: AS mentioned by heynnema. Freezing the drive may help you to accomplish this. In fact if you can get the termperature down to about -20 celsius this can actually improve the strength of the magnetic field improving the odds of recovering data from weak sectors.

Depending on what happened data recovery efforts might be a lost cause. Regardless of what happened the first thing I would try would be to image this faulty drive to an image file using ddrescue

Preperation:

You will need another drive with a formatted partition with enough available space to hold the entire 750GB image. I will refer to this as recovery partition from here on. Note: You must utilize a file system on this recovery partition capable of holding a 750 GB file (FAT16 or FAT 32 will not) ext2/3/4 preferred

You will need to enable the Universe repository

You will need to install the gddrescue package for your version of Ubuntu which contains ddrescue and ddrescuelog

By issuing the command sudo apt-get install gddrescue

Create a directory to mount your recovery partition with the command sudo mkdir /mnt/recover and mount your recovery partition to /mnt/recover with mount device dir where device is your recovery partition and dir is your mount point.

Example: sudo mount /dev/sdX /mnt/recoverthen change to that directory with the command cd /mnt/recover

Create An Image of the failing drive

Issue the command

$sudo ddrescue -r 3 source target log

where source is the source drive such as /dev/sdc (your may be different) and target is the target image file and log is the log file that tracks the progress.

Example: sudo ddrescue -r 3 /dev/sdc recovery.img recovery.log

The -r 3 switch tells the system to retry 3 times before giving up on a failed transfer.

You can also utilize the -b n (sector size option)

-b, --sector-size=<bytes>
              sector size of input device [default 512]

and -c n (cluster size option)

-c, --cluster-size=<sectors>
              sectors to copy at a time [128]

if you desire (personally I've had good luck with the defaults)

ddrecover will split blocks that it can't read in an attempt to recover as much data as possible. Be aware that if the drive is in poor condition this process can take a very long time. (You can reduce the time and effectiveness by reducing the number of aforementioned retries.

Analyze and mount the image

There are a number of ways to do this which are described here

Perform Data Recovery as necessary

testdisk is a good choice for this There's a detailed answer on using testdisk here

If anything about this (or any of my other of my answers) is unclear, feel free to drop me a comment and I'll clarify to the best of my ability.

Sources:

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/213891en

http://tuhsphysics.ttsd.k12.or.us/Research/IB09/HougBlat/index.htm

How do I enable the "Universe" repository?

http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=gddrescue&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all

Mount single partition from image of entire disk (device)

Partitions disappeared after power loss while installing

This is going to sound very strange, and I'll probably get a few down votes (please don't) for this, but I'm an old timer that's been around for a while, and I'll tell you about a few little tricks that we used to try in the old days, and it DID save some data for us...

If the read/write heads are stuck to the platters, the drive won't even spin up (which could also be a bad drive motor). Take the bare drive and quickly rotate the drive around the drive motor axis. It's got to be a snap rotate to break the "sticktion" if that's what's occurring. Retry the drive.

Another thing that you can try...

Take the bare drive in put it into the freezer, yes, the freezer. Enclose it in a zip lock bag to keep the moisture out. Purge excess air from the bag. The freezer trick is for a host of other failure modes, to include bad solder joints, bad circuit etches, chips that fail as soon as they reach temperature, bearings in motors and data head actuators, etc.

Try 10-15 minutes first. After that, remove it from the freezer and immediately reconnect the drive to your computer and see if you can recover data using any of the methods available to you, including the ones described in the other answers.

Let us know if it worked for you.

I cannot directly solve your problem, but I might be able to point you in a good direction.

Have you heard of "spinrite"? I have used it (albeit for windows) and it worked for me (apparently it works with linux too).

https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

(I am in no way affiliated with this company, and have nothing to gain except possibly feeling good if you didn't know about it and it ends up solving your problem).