A customer recently delivered their Adata HV620S external hard disk to us. When they plugged the 2TB disk into their Windows 10 PC, they received the error message “Not Responding”. The disk made their whole Windows 10 PC freeze and they could not access any data. They even tried to run the Checkdisk utility to fix the disk, but that too froze half-way through. Could Drive Rescue help? Of course, we have successfully recovered data from several Adata external hard disks before (such as the HD650 and HD710) and we were sure this model would be no exception!
We removed the disk from it’s plastic enclosure and found a Samsung Momentus ST2000LM003 S-ATA disk. Our diagnosis revealed several translator issues and over 73,000 bad sectors. The translator plays a crucial role in the management of the disk’s data. And the disk sectors play an equally important role storing actual bytes of data. We resolved these problems within a couple of hours.
External Hard Disks and “Not Responding” error messages
Our customer wanted to know “why did Windows display the ‘not responding’ error message” every time the disk was connected to their computer?” The reason is simple. Windows was not designed to work with disks that are failing. Windows (and MacOS for that matter) were designed with the underlying assumption that the attached storage device(s) are good.
Why Checkdisk (CHKDSK) Cannot Fix Hard Disks
Our customer also wanted to know why the Checkdisk utility built into Windows could not fix the disk. Well, this utility was primarily designed by Microsoft to fix file system errors (FAT and NTFS) and to mark disk bad sectors. It was never designed to fix disk firmware or hardware issues. In fact, for a lot of disk issues, Checkdisk can do more harm than good. So, Checkdisk freezing during an attempted repair volume operation was probably a blessing in disguise!
Anyway, all the customer’s RW2 files (Panasonic Lumix RAW), .DOCX, XLSX and .PPTX files were all successfully recovered onto a new external hard disk. The relieved customer left our offices vowing never to trust a single hard disk with their valuable data ever again!
Drive Rescue offers a full data recovery and repair service from Adata external hard disks in Ireland. We have previously recovered from models such as the HD650, HD700, HD710 and HD720. www.datarecoverydublin.ie