Interrupted hard drive during copy, is it dead now?

[ght56]

If DriveDX indicates all individual health indicators look good and it does complete the test successfully, it suggests (but does not guarantee) that this may be something other than hardware failure. The metrics that DriveDX reads are reasonably good at predicting and ascertaining failures, but they do not perfectly predict or determine failure.

Is this drive by chance formatted in ExFAT?

 

[LIVEFRMNYC]

From experience, it's most likely the controller board inside the case, NOT the drive itself. I can almost guarantee if you shuck the drive and put it in a cheap usb external enclosure, it will run smoothly. WD is known for this.

 

[pdxw]

From experience, it's most likely the controller board inside the case, NOT the drive itself. I can almost guarantee if you shuck the drive and put it in a cheap usb external enclosure, it will run smoothly. WD is known for this.

I was just going to suggest exactly this! I had the same thing happen with a LaCie external drive. I thought it was dead, but as soon as I shucked it, it worked perfectly.

 

[ght56]

From experience, it's most likely the controller board inside the case, NOT the drive itself. I can almost guarantee if you shuck the drive and put it in a cheap usb external enclosure, it will run smoothly. WD is known for this.

I don't believe this is a shuckable drive.

 

[q64ceo]

I'll be happy to try this since I have Windows 7 on an old Mac.

Plug it in to your Windows machine
Open the Windows menu. Right click on Command Prompt. Select "Open as Administrator"
Type in diskpart
When it loads type "list disk"
When you see the disk in the list, type "select disk NUMBER". For example, if the disk is listed as "Disk 1", you would say "select disk 1"
Then type "clean"
(WARNING MAKE SURE ITS THE CORRECT DRIVE. TYPING THE NEXT COMMAND WIPES THE DISK.)
Hit "y" and enter
Disconnect from your Windows machine and hook it up back to your mac.


/Sorry for the few day delay. I ran into some things.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

Here's a post showing the process.

 

[jent]

I just want to add an update that since my last post where the drive mounted, I was able to reformat it and everything seems back to normal. Per everyone's advice, I won't treat the drive as normal but rather prone to die at any time, and use it only to move non-critical data. A little more info and context in my replies below.

It is possible, but very incredibly unlikely to corrupt a drive bad enough that it won't mount, or be seen, and low level formatted by the number of utilities that are out there. I've done most of my low level formatting using Windows. For the longest time, there were no utilities that provided that function from the major companies. Possibly a limitation caused by macOS trying to keep us away from the lower levels of the hardware. *shrug*

Kill Disk was a Q&D utility that ran on Windows and DOS to low level any drive. It was agnostic, and would 'kill' anything. I still find myself using Windows and the drive manufacturer utilities to diagnose drive issues.

Sounds good. Based on the drive being "normal" again I guess a worst-case scenario of damage to the drive or controller didn't happen.

If DriveDX indicates all individual health indicators look good and it does complete the test successfully, it suggests (but does not guarantee) that this may be something other than hardware failure. The metrics that DriveDX reads are reasonably good at predicting and ascertaining failures, but they do not perfectly predict or determine failure.

Is this drive by chance formatted in ExFAT?

I was going to mention that! It was indeed ExFAT, since I was originally moving files from a work Windows PC. I had video files that were over 4GB in size so ExFAT seemed to be the best solution that allowed interoperability with Windows and macOS as well as file sizes over 4GB. After reformatting as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) with GUID Partition Table (since I'm now moving files between a 2010 and 2020 Mac, I don't want to use APFS in case it's too new for the old Mac), file copy speeds on both computers were exactly what you would expect for USB 2.0 and 3.0, respectively.

From experience, it's most likely the controller board inside the case, NOT the drive itself. I can almost guarantee if you shuck the drive and put it in a cheap usb external enclosure, it will run smoothly. WD is known for this.

In the spirit of learning if the drive acts only again I'll be happy to shuck it and experiment further. But I'm glad it seems to be normal now!

I was just going to suggest exactly this! I had the same thing happen with a LaCie external drive. I thought it was dead, but as soon as I shucked it, it worked perfectly.

I'll do it if I need to!

 

[jent]

Plug it in to your Windows machine
Open the Windows menu. Right click on Command Prompt. Select "Open as Administrator"
Type in diskpart
When it loads type "list disk"
When you see the disk in the list, type "select disk NUMBER". For example, if the disk is listed as "Disk 1", you would say "select disk 1"
Then type "clean"
(WARNING MAKE SURE ITS THE CORRECT DRIVE. TYPING THE NEXT COMMAND WIPES THE DISK.)
Hit "y" and enter
Disconnect from your Windows machine and hook it up back to your mac.


/Sorry for the few day delay. I ran into some things.

No worries, thanks for the info! Would this work even though all of the other attempts using Windows didn't work due to incorrect permissions? Regardless, things appear to be back to normal now so I won't worry about it unless the problem arises again. Thank you!

 

[ght56]

I was going to mention that! It was indeed ExFAT, since I was originally moving files from a work Windows PC. I had video files that were over 4GB in size so ExFAT seemed to be the best solution that allowed interoperability with Windows and macOS as well as file sizes over 4GB. After reformatting as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) with GUID Partition Table (since I'm now moving files between a 2010 and 2020 Mac, I don't want to use APFS in case it's too new for the old Mac), file copy speeds on both computers were exactly what you would expect for USB 2.0 and 3.0, respectively.

I should have asked this earlier. ExFAT file corruption can do everything you have described. ExFAT is a really bad file system and it has all kinds of issues—severe corruption resulting from a power loss event or a disconnect when writing data is indeed one of them. Windows 10 can sometimes repair ExFAT corruption that Mac cannot. However, there are even limits to that and sometimes all you can do is a low-level format and start over.

I strongly recommend using either APFS/HFS+ (HFS+ is MacOS Extended) or NTFS for storage of important data, and using some sort of intermediate to transfer between the two.

 

[jent]

I should have asked this earlier. ExFAT file corruption can do everything you have described. ExFAT is a really bad file system and it has all kinds of issues—severe corruption resulting from a power loss event or a disconnect when writing data is indeed one of them. Windows 10 can sometimes repair ExFAT corruption that Mac cannot. However, there are even limits to that and sometimes all you can do is a low-level format and start over.

I strongly recommend using either APFS/HFS+ (HFS+ is MacOS Extended) or NTFS for storage of important data, and using some sort of intermediate to transfer between the two.

Thanks for the info! I should have mentioned the file system from the beginning. Based on the fact that everything feels normal and my USB 2.0 and 3.0 file transfer speeds are now working fine on the drive formatted as HFS+, would you say I should consider the drive to be normal again? Either way I'm just glad to not be stuck with a totally dead drive!

 

[ght56]

Thanks for the info! I should have mentioned the file system from the beginning. Based on the fact that everything feels normal and my USB 2.0 and 3.0 file transfer speeds are now working fine on the drive formatted as HFS+, would you say I should consider the drive to be normal again? Either way I'm just glad to not be stuck with a totally dead drive!

No problem! I would use it for a little while before saying that it is good to go, but my guess is that you experienced directory corruption and that the drive itself is fine, especially given DriveDX says the drive is healthy.

Of course, regardless of the drive health, always be sure to keep multiple copies of important files on different storage mediums as hard drives can fail catastrophically without warning and data corruption can turn the files on a drive completely unreadable. Doing this is the key to ultimately avoiding data loss.