[boobymilk]

Hello forums.

I am new here and I have a quick question:

I am using a small TOSHIBA 1TB internal HDD with a good quality SATA to USB converter.
It works fine, but today it made for 1 second like an electronic "beep" sound, it sounded even a bit like a fine scratching sound.
This happened while downloading a file onto it, but the download didn't show any error, and it just continued to download after a short rest on 0kb/s speed.

This situation was not triggered by any moving or dropping of the drive. The HDD just rested carefully on the desk.
Windows showed no errors and nothing else, and the download manager also didn't show any errors.

My question is: Could this sound mean that files on the HDD were damaged?
I store on there many folders with each 10.000 small archives and .zip-files, and I am worried that some of these got corrupted, and I don't know how to check this big amount of files.
So, could something be corrupted when the scratching/"beep"-sound happened? And if, how can I check which files and .zip's got corrupted?


PS. I did use the search function, but most of the threads and google results are much too specific.. all I need is a short advice, and sadly I don't have anyone who I can ask.
Thanks a lot!


EDIT: Check answer #17 for conclusion of my case.

 

[Corday]

First and foremost, I hope you have backups. The beep could have been one of your Microsoft sounds since they have many purposes. Run the command chkdsk /r to check and repair your HD.

 

[boobymilk]

Thank you for your reply.
The "beep" sound was clearly coming from the HDD itself. It was like a mechanical sound.
Sadly I don't have a full backup of this drive, and I literally just this weekend wanted to create one.

When I run chkdsk, will it find/repair corrupted files?

 

[SpywareDr]

CHKDSK verifies the file system integrity of a volume and attempts to fix logical file system errors.

More info here: chkdsk

 

[boobymilk]

I read this info, and it helped me to understand how to use chkdsk. Thank you!
So it actually could be able to save individual files that were corrupted? Or will it just repair the file system in general to avoid formatting the whole disk?

 

[spunk.funk]

Any noise, other then the normal humming, coming from a HDD means it has failed or is in the process of failing. Check Disk will not help, as it scans the drive for Bad Sectors, and if there are just a couple it will try to move the data off of that bad sector to a new sector near by. But a HDD that has a mechanical fault, like yours, could fail at any moment, the more you access the drive or try to "Fix" it the less chance you will be able to access your files. I would get another External USB HDD of the same size or larger. You can try doing an Image of the failing drive using Macrium Reflect or your favorite Clone Software or creating a clone of that drive and save the image or clone to your new Drive. Once backed up, you can attempt various Fixes like Check Disk but the reality is this drive needs to be replaced.

 

[SpywareDr]

Use chkdsk with the "/r" parameter to tell it to locates bad sectors and and attempt to recover readable information. "/r" also includes the functionality of "/f", which does an additional analysis of physical disk errors. For example:

chkdek x: /f​

​

(Replace the x: with the drive letter you want chkdsk to check).

 

[boobymilk]

Actually I have something I realized. This "beep" sound or scratch sound is exactly same like when the HDD is at full speed and I remove the USB plug.
It is exactly the same sound. Is it possible that there are power problems?
I used recently a external powered multi-USB hub, which is cheap quality.

Is it actually possible for the HDD to have not enough power, but Windows does not realize this? Because when this happened, I didn't hear any Windows notification about "USB device removed".
I also recently got some kind of an "I/O error" inside my download manager while downloading something. I had to restart the download, but Windows didn't give me any USB notification or errors.

If it is a problem with the power of the HDD, are my files that are stored on it safe if they just were stored on it?

 

[SpywareDr]

The drive was designed to work within specific operating conditions. Attempting to use the drive outside of those is not recommended and could cause all kinds of unknown problems.

 

[SoCalBryan]

So I had a seagate usb drive that had the combo plug and the connector inside from getting torqed from the cord hanging started to not seat correctly and would lose power. It would make a beep and reinitialize.

My suggestion is to pull that HDD out of that usb case and put in another usb case.

Chkdsk with not recover a file with a name that is familiar if it does at all. For the most part it will recover the sectors the file sat in as multiple files base on the sector width. You would then have to piece the files back together yourself. Unless you have the ability to do this consider them gone.

As far as that last file I'd say if the HDD lost power in the middle of a write then indeed that file is corrupted. If it was a zip file you may be able to recover a portion of the files inside it. Zip and RAR have a way to do this. You will have to do some web searching to find out how to do this.

I had a zipped archive that didnot finish transferring and was able to recover some of the files inside the corrupt zipfile. but it was a long time ago and I dont have any references or links to give you.

 

[Sophus]

You might try windiff. It's a program that will compare all files from two different folders (and optionally their subfolders) even from different drives. It was (is?) an open-source Microsoft-glommed program included in a huge utilities package but that may be no longer available. There is an "unofficial" copy here which as far as I can tell is legit but I would still exercise caution. I've successfully used earlier versions to quite easily compare large file archives.
#1 Grigsoft

Download WinDiff

#2 Softpedia

Download WinDiff 5.1

Download WinDiff - Easily compare two files or folders and get differences highlighted for quick identification with the help of this simple application

www.softpedia.com

Another thing you can do is hash every file on both drives and manually compare the hashes. There are a number of hashing programs out there. I like "hash my files".

As for "chkdsk"...if you use the /r or /f option it CAN render all files unrecoverable. For example, I used it a few days ago on my Win10 laptop after an external drive reported an error after plugging it into a USB port. After "chkdsk E: /f" was applied, there were ZERO files in the recovery. Before the chkdsk with the /f option, there were several thousand files on the drive and they WERE readable. Now they are all gone. Fortunately I had copied all the file to another drive before I performed the /f option. By the way, you CAN get false positives from Windows. There can be nothing wrong with a drive and you can still get a pop-up that tells you to perform a chkdsk to "fix" the drive. On my laptop it seems to happen mostly on drives that take a long time to spin-up after being awakened by the system (like a 10TB WD My Book).

Chkdsk is NOT intended to recover individual folders and files in their original state. It is intended foremost to repair the disk operating system drive data STRUCTURE as formatted...not individual files. As someone above said there may be file "pieces" in a recovery folder that you can TRY to put back together but in most cases that's a massive and often unsuccessful task. It's like recovering the letters in a file cabinet after a tornado. Chkdsk will rebuild the file cabinet and create some folders and a "recovery" folder, but individual damaged folders and torn-apart letters are generally in tiny pieces strewn all over the place that YOU have to assemble back into usable folders and readable letters.

 

[boobymilk]

Thanks for all the replies.
In my case it was indeed a problem with power supply.

The "SATA to USB"-converter was already old, and I tried to connect the HDD now directly by SATA in an old PC of mine, and it works perfectly.
I sadly indeed copied files while the power stopped for 1 second, and Windows didn't give any notification. It just paused at 0kb/s until the HDD spin up again.

I really don't know if the files which I wanted copy were copied correctly, and sadly the original files are already overwritten by now, so I can't use WinDiff for comparing the copied files with the original files anymore.
All I can do is hope that Windows managed to understand that the HDD had a power problem, and then correctly paused the copy-task. For me a good indicator is, that it was staying always at 0kb/s copy speed - at least it was showing it like this. I don't know what actually is the situation now, but there is not much I can do now.

As far as that last file I'd say if the HDD lost power in the middle of a write then indeed that file is corrupted. If it was a zip file you may be able to recover a portion of the files inside it. Zip and RAR have a way to do this. You will have to do some web searching to find out how to do this.

I just hope you are wrong, because I try to trust that Windows will give me at least an error-message when it fails to copy a file correctly..

 

[SoCalBryan]

I just hope you are wrong, because I try to trust that Windows will give me at least an error-message when it fails to copy a file correctly..

Nope after losing a crapload of files with the default windows copy feature I now use a third party file copy and move utility called TeraCopy and I never use the move feature of any OS. Always copy files never move them. Delete the source only after your are sure the source and destination files are same.

TeraCopy will copy the files with a CRC checksum and if select the verify feature will compare the destination file to the source. Windows does not do this and never has to my knowledge.

If there's an issue with a file on the source drive TeraCopy with skip it and try to continue on.

Windows does not check the files it just reads whatever it thinks is there and copies that data to the destination. No file checking or CRC code generation. If there's a powerloss it can leave file without an end of file designation or corrupted file.

I use UltraFileSearch Lite to compare files and folders. Their home website no longer has a lite (freeware) version. But it's worth the purchase if you are copying large amounts of files and folders.
My favorite feature is the ability to to search files for text strings.

 

[Sgayres]

Having been burned from having a storage drive fail, I use a 2-disk networked attached storage drive where it is set to RAID1 which "mirrors" the disks. Mine is Diskstation DS220j. Bought it from Amazon empty and put two 3TB WD Red drives in it. Little bit of a learning curve but I no longer worry about my data.

 

[SoCalBryan]

Been using a Buffalo LinkStation NAS for 8 or 9 years on a wired netword. I replace the drives 3 times to keep new drives in it since it's online all the time. Never had a failure on it. Has 2 1 terabyte drives in a mirrored setup.

Nice thing is you can setup it up to access through the internet as personal cloud storage. Nice feature.

 

[boobymilk]

I understand..
So what about downloading files? If while downloading from the internet the HDD loses for 1 second it's power, how will the average web browser handle this? Because in Chrome it behaved same as the copy-feature of Windows (means it stopped for a few seconds on 0kb/s and then continued without any notification or error).

Also, I checked now a big amount of files which I copied while the power problems were. But I just checked the size of the folders, and checked for the exact size in bytes: All the data seems fine.
I have the right amount of files which I copied and the same size, in bytes.

Could there still be problems? Does the copy-feature of Windows just "register" these bytes, even if it didn't write them at all?
Because now I did a full backup of this HDD, and the folder still have all their attributes on the new backup drive, too. All the amounts of folders, files and the sizes seem fine. The .zip files also open normally.
Wouldn't the corruption of files be easily to recognize by broken .zip files, or would they remain fine in the outside, but with broken files inside?
Because in my experience, always when there were problems with a .zip file, it wouldn't even open them at all, and show an error message.

 

[boobymilk]

Ok, I will post now a conclusion of this whole topic, so that people finding this in the search or Google find a possible solution:

After checking and testing the same HDD by SATA on other computers, and trying another SATA-USB dock, I found that it was indeed a power problem or another technical problem in the SATA-USB dock/converter itself. It seems like this device just is not working properly anymore, maybe because of its age.
Other HDD's began to behave similar to the first one which I talked about in this thread.

The solution obviously was in my case to replace it and use the HDD in another converter, or to use it as an internal HDD.
The HDD is fine, and checks showed it is healthy.

About my files I can't say anything and sadly I didn't find a way to check all these files. So if I am lucky, the broken dock still was able to copy the files that I was mentioning.
Now I backed up everything, and time will show if some files got corrupted or not. But I actually think I was lucky and the files didn't get corrupted, because all files which I tested were working fine and the big zip files are still able to open. Also the byte count of the files is still same like the original files on the local disk where I copied it from.


So whoever has a problem similar to this should immediately take the HDD off the dock to avoid files getting corrupted.
Just buy a new one, or use the HDD as internal storage.

Thank you, everyone, for your help!

 

[spunk.funk]

Glad you got it sorted.