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All too often I see the same scenario “I ran CHKDSK and now my data is corrupt”.

The wrong way

The hard disk is physically failing, and you let CHKDSK /R or CHKDSK /F run on it. Running CHKDSK on a failing hard drive is basically suicide for your data. CHKDSK is not a data recovery utility. It doesn’t behave like one. Data recovery utilities are cautious. If the sector is not readable, it will leave it be. CHKDSK will tenaciously retry until the data is not recoverable, mark the sector unrecoverable, and basically make my work a lot more difficult.

In summary, if your hard disk is failing, under no circumstances should you run CHKDSK on it. If Windows wants to run it, cancel it.

The correct way

A data recovery company, like yours truly, will take a disk image. On the PC, we typically use ddrescue. If the drive is too fragile for that utility, a specialty tool is pressed into service.

Once we have that image, we can do whatever we want with it. We can do it safely because we do not alter the original data. That means, that among other things, we can copy it, and run a CHKDSK on the copy of that image. If CHKDSK creates more problems than it solves, well, then we simply undo the damage by copying whatever useful result there was from this image, deleting it, and trying a different approach.

Why would we run CHKDSK in the first place, you might ask? Usually, we’ll run it if we are returning a bootable system to the customer. We want to ensure that it will function as it did pre-crash.

CHKDSK, when run on a healthy media, such as our lab virtual image drive, will correct NTFS errors that prevent Windows from starting.

So here I was at some forsaken mall at Cheesecake Factory.

While waiting for the order, I figured why not go check out what’s new at Hot Topic, which is one of my favorite stores.

I spotted a new CD by Judas Priest called “Nostradamus”, a double-CD release for $16.99. Now, that was cool. I haven’t bought a CD in who knows how long, but this I had to have. The cover advertised a free ticket to the show.

I looked at the back, and much to my surprise, there is a date on August 31, 2008 at Shoreline in Mountain View.

The pleasant surprises continued at the cash register. The CD was actually only $11.99.

As a result of a supremely boring dinner, I got a reason to block off my day for August 31 with my free ticket to see Judas Priest live!

The last time I saw them was Ozzfest 2004 where I was a sponsor VIP. They absolutely stole the show!

I am excited!

This is rather interesting.

All my life I\’d been testing as ENTP. Now that I finally figured out all my business strategies and began to successfully execute them, I\’ve become an ENTJ, according to this test.

That\’s rather fascinating because apparently as you move from having an employee\’s mindset to having a business owner\’s mindset, that changes the personality this much.

Hmm, however, I still feel that I am an ENTP.

I\’ll be looking into this for more insight when I find more time.

On the Internet, I am known as wiseleo on just about every system. Even my lovely car wears the \”Wise Leo\” license plate. In short, I am really not a modest person and make no attempt to conceal this fact. Whether it\’s a strength or a weakness depends on your perspective, with which I am fine regardless of your choice.

You can very quickly run your background check on me now. There will be a few thousand hits and most of them will be on me.

However, on this system wiseleo is owned by some lady. Rather than settling for wiseleo2, wiseleo_, wiseleo_k or some other unimaginable nonsense, I decided to crown myself king.

You are welcome to serve me.

Ordinarily, only about 1% of hard disks are affected by a motor seizure failure.

However, we see a trend where a large number of problems with external HDDs wind up with this very expensive problem. This is an abnormal trend and there is only one factor that significantly increases its likelihood of occurrence.

External hard disk spindle failure symptoms

If the motor inside the hard disk is not spinning and the drive was just tipped over, you just got one very expensive problem.

How can you tell if the disk is not spinning? If you hear an almost musical sound of 2 beeps and then the drive shuts down, then you probably got a spindle failure.

Usually, you’ll need to get the drive out of its enclosure to be able to listen to it properly.

Your data is probably safe

A motor seizure doesn’t actually cause data loss, in cases that I’d come across at the very least. It simply makes it very inconvenient to access that data. It’s frozen until the motor can be unfrozen.

How to prevent external HDD motor seizure

Fortunately, it’s simple to prevent.

Almost all cases begin with “My drive tipped over and… I need your help”

In order to avoid this really expensive repair, please do not run your external hard drives in vertical position. Lay them down, and your likelihood of encountering a spindle seizure will be significantly reduced.

Some disks look better than others when in horizontal position. I personally love Acomdata products. I do so for 3 reasons:

1. Aluminum case acts like a heatsink. Hard disks hate heat. The colder they are, the longer they live.
2. They look good and are stackable in horizontal position
3. They are very easy to open to use as a normal external enclosure. Only 2 philips screws and the whole case opens up.

Why is motor failure expensive to repair?

Here is what we need to do in terms of fluid bearings failure.

1. Open the disk and attempt to restart the motor
2. Obtain an identical disk to use as a donor model. As we purchase these from specialty sellers, any drive of any vintage will likely cost at least $200. That drive will be destroyed.
3. Perform platter transfer procedure. This takes about 4 hours due to extreme delicacy involved in the heads transfer process. The motor is built-in into the drive chassis to such an extent that it is impossible to replace without taking off the platters. At that point, one might as well simply transfer the platters and the system board to a known working drive chassis.

In summary, assuming the billable rate of $150/hr, you are looking at a $800-1000 bill for parts and labor. The recovery technicians really do have to do that much work in this case.

Data recovery is split about 80% logical issues, 15% electronics issues, 4% heads issue, and 1% motor failure. While 95% of issues are moderately easy to fix, the last 5 % is a genuine pain and specialty tools are required.

Motor failure is that 1% of issues that requires procedures normally performed in specialty “clean room” environment. Is a bona-fide clean room actually required? Not really, but during the head stack transfer procedure the drives are open for an extended period of time, so it helps to reduce any possible contamination. Heads failure is in the same category, but transferring just the heads is actually less hassle than transferring the platters is.

It takes specialized and expensive tools to perform this kind of work.

You will greatly reduce the risk of external hard disk drive failure if you simply use it horisontally.

Always have more than one backup! Keep at least one copy offsite, such as in a safety deposit box at your bank.

Keep copies of your most important documents and files on CDs and/or DVDs.