Windows 10: HDD failure (again) ... any suggestions

I have a 1TB WD Caviar Black. Died it seems, under warranty - but WD will only swap the unit no Data recovery.
PC failure to boot up .... (OS is not on this drive) removed this HDD and PC would boot up.

Any attempts to put it back in another PC .. crashes that PC as well.

A colleague connected it to a MAC ... and it could then be scanned - one partition shows OK, but the larger E:\partition throws up h/ware failure.

Any free tools worth trying to see if I can recover any of the data ... welcome any advice.
Professional data recovery firms will be too expensive.

I have a backup, so at most only last last 3 weeks of changes. *Sad

:)

 

Is Windows 10 causing early HD failures

If you read thru the MS forums there is little, if any indication that W10 is a possible cause of HDD failure (I am not defending W10, by the way.) There are some posts claiming that their HDD,s appear to be running more frequently and causing overheating,
none of those indicated that their HHD, eventually died due to this!!!!!

There is a website called Backblaze, that do regular tests on HDD, (refer link below), they have quite a lot of info on HDD failures, but not whether it is due OS,s or what the actual causes were!

Hard Drive Failure: Analysis of 49,056 Hard Drives

A website search for HDD failures due to W10, does not support any evidence of HDD failure due to OS,s.

The only way I can think that an OS may cause a HDD failure, is if there was a setting, which would cause the HDD failure by thrashing (constant use).

Did you have any indication that the HDD,s were being over-extended, before they died?

When I was active working, I found that virtually all HDD,s I replaced was because of mechanical failure of some part of the HDD, (I will admit that was several years ago and HDD technology & reliability are much better now.)

Have you check the PC manufacturer warranty, as to what terms if any, covers HDD failure?

 

Battery authetication code failure-any suggestions?

I have recently purchased a new Nokia 2630 phone, together with the battery, headset, user manual etc. The purchase was made in one of the established retail shops in Zagreb, Croatia, which is supplied through the authorized dealer and servicer of Nokia
for Croatia.

Following guidance on the official Nokia web site, I wanted to authenticate if the battery inside the purchased phone was genuine, however, upon repeated attempts, I kept getting the failure message that the code could not have been authenticated: "Authentication
Unsuccessful: Invalid 20-digit code"

The battery does, however, bear the hologram label, which appears to be authentic.

I then took the phone to the dealer, who were only too unable and unwilling to try and authenticate the battery code; instead, I got an unpleasant reply that "everything is ok with the battery, because it says it's Nokia, therefore, it must be genuine"! Needless
to say, the authentication was made just by visual inspection of the battery. On my refusal to accept such an unprofessional explanation, I was being persuaded that the authentication code failure doesn't mean that the battery is fake, and that it actually
doesn't matter if the code passed the authentication or not. Furthermore, I was told that due to the relatively fresh date of manufacture, the code might have not been uploaded to Nokia's web site yet (I seriously doubt that this is done manually, therefore
refuse to believe this statement)!

Another issue was the FCC code inside the phone, underneath the battery. Previous Nokia I've owned, had the label with FCC code clearly visible, and was traceable, too; however, this new one lacks the FCC code on the label inside. Is it necessary for the phone
to have such FCC code stated on the label, and is there a way that can I find out why it's lacking on this phone?

As you can see, there's basically nothiing I can do from here, so I sent an email to *** Email address is removed for privacy ***, as suggested, but haven't received any reply so far. I was wondering has anyone had a similar problem, and how did you go about it?

I am willing to explore every option possible to clarify this situation, because I don't feel comfortable bearing in mind that there is a possibility of non-original battery being sold to me under the Nokia license.

Thanks for any advice!

 

A Mac may give problems with NTFS-formatted HDDs if not having a program installed to give that access, I don't on mine. I prefer booting to a Linux LiveDVD [Linux Mint is favored] which does give access and can work with any HDD plugged at the time of the startup.

 

Is that something I can do on my PC ? ....... no experience of LINUX

 

There are plenty of free recovery free cd which you can boot from and try and recover data

 

How would this work ? .... If I Put HDD in the PC .. it drags Windows to a halt .... and it won't boot up if it is there at start.

Do you mean that I boot up PC from a recovery disc that includes its own OS .. so I don't need Windows ?

If that is the case, care to advise such a program I should look at, or do I try any in that web search you linked.

Just read a review of free recovery software - 'DMDE' came out on top, but don't know if that boots up PC as you describe.

 

I would in your case boot from a linux live cd and try to save what is recoverable. Maybe you should also make some thoughts about regular backups not only from your system but your files as well. For me the method of "Grandfather, Father,Son" has worked quite well. That way I never loose my files again (been there,done that)...

 

Last week my data drive, 1 TB WD blue drive failed. Motor would not spin up. Put a little "freeze" on it enough to get it to boot, copied all the files to another HDD, wrote 1's to the entire disk with the WD tool. Got a replacement yesterday, and shipped the old one (9months) back to WD RMA by the USPS. The clerk at the service counter said I recognize that address, seen a lot of them lately????? Loosing my confidence in WD. :-(

 

You are starting to frighten me. even though I have 1TB and 2TB drives as well, I mostly buy the black series due to the longer warranty and cannot complain so far. the real 24/7 task I have on my purple 3TB drive which is holding up nicely... I had a 1TB drive fail within warranty (black series) and got a refurb'd blue series back. Ah well, its still working though.....

 

This drive first failed after only 1 month ........... it was replaced and now failed again.
I have some HDD are close on 20 years old .......... but much lower capacity - as storage capacity increased they seem to be less reliable.

 

Does anyone in here know if the thread-starter's WD HD has on-board/circuit-level encryption -- [in][dependent] of SmartWare and Drive Unlock? I'm trying to amass some information for future use.

 

This is a standard Caviar Black drive - maybe the spec sheet on WD website will tell you that answer ?

 

Perhaps that is what I got back, refurb. The replacement HDD had the same model # and label, however it was not blue on the label?? 2 days so far, so good. I am going to look at my cable company's DVR boxes and see what brand hdd they use, both run 24/7 for over 3 years now, no problems. 1 is 500gb and the other is 1TB*Zip