Am I breaking these laptop hard drives?

[Techtree]

I'm starting to think this can't be a coincidence. I routinely image the customers drive when they do a drop off. It's easy to hook it up and run it overnight and then at least I know once everything is good I delete the image and move on.

I use a USB to SATA on my desktop. I have yet to get a hard drive toaster. Anyway, the last three drives ive plugged in don't mount. They are detected it diskmgmt but that's it. So on this drive tonight the problem occurred and I said OK screw it. I put the drive back in the customers laptop and "no bootable device detected".

Great so I broke it? What the hell is going on?

So now I have to do a data recovery on this drive and reinstall windows on top of the regular service they brought it in for.

Unless I can repair the boot sector? These drives seem perfectly healthy... until I plug them into my work machine.

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

It's a good possibility there is a problem with your adapter. I have a dedicated machine I run Parted Magic on. I leave the side cover off and connect directly to the SATA cables from the MB. Works great and typically a much faster transfer than going USB to SATA.

 

[coffee]

Have you tested your rig with one of your drives to see if it happens there?

I use this:

http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-eSATA-Drive-Docking-Station/dp/B004I6OCRO/ref=cm_cr_dp_asin_lnk

I have been using it for the last 4 months or so. Its pretty good. I do not care for the usb connection because I cannot run smart tests on the drives connected via USB. I like the eSATA.

I think I posted that above a bit ago and some here where telling me you can but I do not remember the complete conversation. You can correct me if I am wrong.

Anyways, Test it with one of your drives. I would think its an adapter issue too.

 

[phaZed]

I second ditching the USB adapter and using SATA directly. Also, if you're hooking up to a Windows box... well, that might be it right there. Linux only, Windows wants to fix everything and screw up boot sectors.

 

[Techtree]

I've got access to several MBR repair tools. Think it's worth trying that to get the drive booting again? It's from an ACER and has several partitions on it including a recovery and "one button reset" partition.

I definitely need to ditch the adapter either way.

 

[coffee]

I've got access to several MBR repair tools. Think it's worth trying that to get the drive booting again? It's from an ACER and has several partitions on it including a recovery and "one button reset" partition.

I definitely need to ditch the adapter either way.

How about ---- Did you try and put one of the suspected drives in another computer and run a smart test? Do they pass? I mean, Without knowing what the problem is it could be hardware or software. (??)

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

What software are you using for the clone? Does Linux see the drive?

 

[coffee]

Have you tested your rig with one of your drives to see if it happens there?

I use this:

http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-eSATA-Drive-Docking-Station/dp/B004I6OCRO/ref=cm_cr_dp_asin_lnk

I have been using it for the last 4 months or so. Its pretty good. I do not care for the usb connection because I cannot run smart tests on the drives connected via USB. I like the eSATA.

I think I posted that above a bit ago and some here where telling me you can but I do not remember the complete conversation. You can correct me if I am wrong.

Anyways, Test it with one of your drives. I would think its an adapter issue too.

The link above is incorrect for some reason ---> Get it on Amazon.

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

The link above is incorrect for some reason ---> Get it on Amazon.

Link seems to be working for me. Shows a black, 4 bay toaster. eSATA/USB 3.0

 

[coffee]

Link seems to be working for me. Shows a black, 4 bay toaster. eSATA/USB 3.0

For some reason it was showing up as some other site and they wanted 229.00 for it. Too tired tonite to look into that.

Thanks,

 

[Techtree]

I'll boot it into Linux tomorrow and see. I know the clients computer was booting until I connected the drive to my windows machine. Talk to you guys tomorrow.

 

[brandonkick]

It could be your cable. I doubt it has anything to do with windows botching the drive, especially
if it's a hot swap thing that you plugging in after the system is booted. I don't see how it would
be any different from a toaster type device.

Do you know for sure if any of the systems booted before you removed the drives?

Maybe think about holding off on using that until you go to do a hdd to ssd migration. You can
get a good clone by slaving the hdd directly to a SATA port on the motherboard and after the
new SSD is set up and ready to go you can try imaging the old hdd using your USB cable.
If it's dead at that point, your USB cable is killing drives. It would be odd, but I wouldn't be shocked
if that were the case.

 

[FremontPC]

That is kind of bizarre. I've seen drives that aren't recognized except in Disk Managment, you only have to assign the partitions of interest a drive letter and they show up in Windows Explorer. I suppose your adapter could be borked and is actually messing with the drive, but I've yet to run into that problem myself.

Did you change the BIOS/EFI settings on the laptop? If you switched it to legacy boot, then it's not going to understand the EFI boot scheme afaik. What version of Windows is on that laptop?

 

[myleso]

We stopped using usb docking stations due to occasional odd issues. Like the drive letter issues that Fremont mentioned, permission issues and other strange behaviour. We use hdclone now and we boot computers from a hdclone flash drive and save the image to an external drive. We purchased several fast HGST Touro 7200 rpm drives for this purpose and have not had any issues since. Doing this we also avoid mounting the customers drive on a windows os.

 

[Techtree]

That is kind of bizarre. I've seen drives that aren't recognized except in Disk Managment, you only have to assign the partitions of interest a drive letter and they show up in Windows Explorer. I suppose your adapter could be borked and is actually messing with the drive, but I've yet to run into that problem myself.

Did you change the BIOS/EFI settings on the laptop? If you switched it to legacy boot, then it's not going to understand the EFI boot scheme afaik. What version of Windows is on that laptop?

The windows laptop is windows 7. It is recognized in disk management as unallocated space. I tried to mount it in Linux without any luck. I do have a hard drive I can test later to try and re-create the issue. However I do need to get myself a hard drive toaster.

Crystaldiscinfo is showing everything as healthy.

For now I'll finish imaging it in DMDE and then see if there are any tools I can use to get it to repair it. I would really like to avoid a format/reinstall if possible.

Question regarding fabs... after my data recovery if I have all files intact can I use fabs to transfer the data back onto the drive after I have formatted it and get it mounting in windows again?

 

[ChrisTech]

Have you tested your rig with one of your drives to see if it happens there?

I use this:

http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-eSATA-Drive-Docking-Station/dp/B004I6OCRO/ref=cm_cr_dp_asin_lnk

+1 on that - I use the 2-bay version and it's so much faster than hooking up via USB and with no Windows interference.

 

[Techtree]

What do you think of this one? It's a lot less expensive:
https://www.amazon.ca/Inateck-Exter...keywords=StarTech-eSATA-Drive-Docking-Station

 

[TurricanII]

I recommend booting Clonezilla from a pxe server or CD ROM or one of the methods of Imaging discussed on here. This avoids the need for you to take the laptop apart each time you want to image it

 

[Techtree]

I recommend booting Clonezilla from a pxe server or CD ROM or one of the methods of Imaging discussed on here. This avoids the need for you to take the laptop apart each time you want to image it

Thanks for the suggestion. I will remember that for the future. In the meantime, TestDisk and I have to spend some quality time together tonight to hopefully get the disk booting again.

 

[altrenda]

fwiw, I use 2 of these http://www.amazon.com/Kingwin-Singl...qid=1463761165&ref_=sr_1_fkmr0_3&sr=8-3-fkmr0 connected via Sata in a box that boots to Parted Magic.
Good for cloning, copying, recovery, wiping, etc quicker without tying up another machine.