[Discuss] NTFS Hard Drive Failing?

[brendan]

linux is often better at mounting slightly corrupted ntfs (and fat) 
filesystems. when i've run into this in the past, i dd the entire 
partition to a file, then fsck/mount the file as a loopback device to 
recover the data (which is pretty much what you've done).

if the SMART tools say it's failing, zeroing it out won't help it any - 
though it might cause it to flag more failing sectors (as it hits them 
while zeroing them out). that might make the drive usable for a while 
(those sectors will be marked unusable), but in my experience once a 
large number of sectors start going bad it's time to get rid of the drive.

On 14-02-12 10:27 AM, Murray Strome wrote:
> I have an external USB hard drive that is probably failing.  I can 
> mount it OK in LINUX, but not in Windows. If I use the smart drive 
> test in LINUX disk utility, it says "failed". The particular item is 
> that it had gone over temperature at some time in the past. It also 
> has several bad sectors.
>
> I am copying all of the data over to another drive now. The next steps 
> I propose to do are:
>
>  1. write zeroes to the whole drive using the disk utility
>  2. create a new partition table
>  3. format the drive (NTFS)
>  4. see if the smart test still fails.
>
> If 4. above, then next step will be to see if it is still under 
> warranty (it is well over two years old), and if so, what I can do to 
> get it replaced. If not, I guess all I can do is "shred" the disk to 
> make certain everything is wiped out, take it for recycling but keep 
> the case to use with other internal SATA hard drives that I have 
> around. If it passes, then I can start using it as a fresh device.
>
> Anyone else experience this kind of problem and if so, what did /YOU/ do?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Murray
>
>
>
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