Hard Disk Monitoring

Hi. I need help/input from you guys with wisdom..

I belive my HD have some sort of physichal damage. It was an USB-shell with a WD 500Gb Sata2 within. My 8 month old daughter dropped it from 30cm. It was shut off atm (i think). My PC read it's Bios and find brand, model, size and more. However, it can't initialise the HD and thus not read it.

I've tried a few utilities from UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) with no luck. I tried Western Digital's "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic..." and finally HD Sentinel with no luck. Every quick selftest ends up at 90% then it get stuck untill I break operation. Sentinels Extended Selftest says Status: working, no problem found(?). Scan took 3h 10min. I cant clone it because the cloneprogram just freeze.

Sentinels surface test says Error: 1117 The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error., Sector: 0.
Then after 2-3 minutes same on sector 1000. And so it goes on and on, sector after sector. And as the test goes on the Drives health drops. From 98% at start to 0% after 8h and sector 15000 or so.

Overview says:
"Failure Predicted - Attribute: 1 Raw Read Error Rate, Errors occurred while
reading raw data from a disk. Indicate problem with the disk surface or the read/write heads.
There are 2 bad sectors on the disk surface. The contents of these sectors
were moved to the spare area.There are 431 weak sectors found on the disk surface.
They may be remapped
any time in the later use of the disk.
Replace hard disk immediately."


Usually I think this kind of tasks is fun but this time I've got a wife staring at me, wanting me to save our family photos on the disk Last hope is to spend 500-1000$ to buy the service.

You think I could buy another WD 500Gb drive and try to move the discs from that bad to the new one? If it is the read/write headers who causes the problems. Just to be able to backup the pics. I don't know if that's possible? Any thoughts about that?


Thanks for reading.

//Daniel, Sweden.

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your message and question.
Oh, I see - this is really a sad situation. There are problems which can't be predicted by any software, for example if your daughter drop the hard disk ...
I'm afraid the problem is that if this happened during read/write, the head(s) and/or the disk platters may experienced a serious damage due to the shock.
If this happens, software can't really help - as no software can remove / replace the damaged items.

> Sentinels surface test says Error: 1117 The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error., Sector: 0.
> Then after 2-3 minutes same on sector 1000. And so it goes on and on, sector after sector. And
> as the test goes on the Drives health drops. From 98% at start to 0% after 8h and sector 15000 or so.

Yes, this is completely expected. The health of the drive is based on the last status determined about the hard disk. After the drop, the hard disk does not immediately notice the problems, just when the heads move to the problematic sectors. During that, the new and new problems detected, the hard disk tries to recover any data from the affected sectors and re-allocate them to the spare area. During that, the hard disk / system may not respond, this is what you see as "freeze", "stop", "stuck", etc...

As more and more problems detected, the hard disk reports that a serious problem happened:

> Overview says:
> "Failure Predicted

The problem is that the file system may be damaged / unavailable also.
In Sentinel, you may try to use Disk -> Surface test -> Read test but before starting, select the Configuration page in the new window and specify that you prefer a "sequential backward test" and disable the "sequential test" which was enabled by default.
This way you can check if any parts (the end) of the hard disk surface is accessible or not - but if not, it may mean head damage - which may cause even more troubles (may damage the disk platters - so personally I'd NOT RECOMMEND this if you have important data on the hard disk).

> You think I could buy another WD 500Gb drive and try to move the discs from that bad to the new one?
> If it is the read/write headers who causes the problems. Just to be able to backup the pics. I don't know if that's possible? Any thoughts about that?

DO NOT try this. The hard disks have clean air inside. Opening the hard disk case would immediately allow "polluted" air and dust to settle on the disk platters, making the hard disk unusable. Opening the hard disk is possible only in clean air rooms of specialized manufacturers / data recovery companies - this is one of the reason why the data recovery is very expensive. But in this situation, I'm afraid I can't say better than ask them for help ...

Thanks for your reply.
I'll drop the HD to the recovery pro´s next week and see what they have to say.

/D