Recuva - as well as entire computer - very slow when external drive connected

[hater]

Backstory: a friend dropped my laptop pretty hard from about 4 feet. This damaged the hard drive. I've dealt with a few damaged hard drives and I can easily identify the clicks when there is a hardware failure inside the drive. However I think I hit the ironic jackpot this time as it sounds like the drive is still spinning perfectly fine. It even booted up Windows after the big drop, just super super slow. From my experience, all of this indicates a scratched drive, which should be somewhat recoverable..

 

So I bought a drive docking station and hooked it up, but when I plug in the drive it slows Recuva down to the point of being unusable. Recuva got stuck at 20%, first saying 2 hours, then 3, then 4 up to 8. I tried to press cancel at this point to mess with some of the settings, and it was acting like a program that couldn't respond. I can use Chrome perfectly fine, too, but if I try doing so much as watching a video(from the drive running my operating system of course) it gets extremely slow, and then as soon as I turn off this docking station - like literally .1 seconds after everything loads and Recuva will cancel.

 

This forum would know better than I, but I was thinking that Windows might be stuck reading the drive at a point it can't get past due to the scratch. What's the best option for me here? Windows keeps asking me I should reformat this drive, I was wondering if this would actually make it easier for Recuva to work?

 

 

I'm running 7 x64 16gb and recovering a 750gb WD on a Plugable dock

[Alan_B]

I suggest you try rebooting the PC and without running Recuva take a screenshot of all that Windows Disk Management can display concerning this drive,

and post the screenshot so we have a better idea of the situation.

[hater]

[hater]

It's the G: one

[Alan_B]

Disk 1 is shown as having a healthy (Active, Primary partition)

and yet it has 3 following partitions that appear inaccessible.

This is something I have never seen and cannot understand.

 

I have seen warnings that issues may arise if a computer has two or more drives with Active partitions.

It may be worth using Disk Management to remove the "Active" flag from G:\ and then rebooting.

I doubt that this will help but it is all I got

 

Hopefully someone else with more experience will be able to advise you.

 

What version of Windows are you using ?

 

Alan

[hater]

7 Home premium. How do I go about removing the active flag? Thanks for the advice

[hater]

Just figured out what you're talking about. I try to do so, but disk management freezes up - I'm assuming this is because it's trying to read or make changes to a scratched disk. If I turn off my docking station, it will move forward a bunch of frames and then the window pops up telling me to format.

 

Side question: will a disk that has been scratched, with working equipment inside, ever be formattable again and hold data?

[login123]

If you didn't make the recovery disks yet you should. 

In case all else fails and you have to reinstall to a new HDD.

[Alan_B]

Disk Management does NOT freeze up when I try to use it to change anything on my 600 GB secondary HDD,

but most of its options are greyed out and inoperative on this disk, most of which has partitions in a similar state to the last 3 partitions on your Disk 1.

All of my WDC partitions are shown as having a size but no indication of NTFS nor FAT32 nor "Unallocated Space".

 

Your Disk 1 seems to be as hopeless as my 600 GB HDD.

All my valuable archives were rescued by the freeware Recovery suite from Lazesoft.

I suggest that you try it.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Back-Up-and-Recovery/Lazesoft-Recovery-Suite-Home.shtml

Use the HELP button which is on the bottom left corner when you launch the application,

it presents a manual which concludes with an email address for support from the developers.

 

The above will not write to the disk when used for data recovery, so if it fails then no harm is done.

(but it does include tools that you can use for creating and restoring partition images if you wish)

 

Freeware Minitool Partition Wizard Boot Recovery CD can recover partitions,

but this involves writing new partition tables - but if it makes the wrong decisions then harm is done - data recovery becomes more difficult.

http://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic/partition-magic-for-windows7.html

 

At the end of the day, if you did ever manage to format this disk and get it to hold data,

would you actually trust it for any purpose higher than being a door stop ?

 

[hater]

If you didn't make the recovery disks yet you should. 

In case all else fails and you have to reinstall to a new HDD.

Nooo you're misunderstanding, I'm running off of my new hard drive after the old one was dropped to the floor. Recuva as well as the OS is running from the new one. 

[login123]

OK.  Got it now.  Alan's suggestion covered everything I know. . . and more.