Hard drive not showing up in Finder

[Haole Boy]

Aloha everyone. I haven't had a hard drive question for a while, so now I'm back with one. Customer brought me a Seagate 5TB Backup Plus Portable drive. Not showing up in her Mac. I plugged it into my Linux Mint 19.1 machine via USB cable. I can see the light go on (steady, not blinking). And it does not show up in Nemo. Also does not show up when doing an 'lsblk -o name,label,size,fstype,model' command. I've noticed that when the USB cable is initially plugged in, I can feel small vibrations as the drive starts up, and if I hold the drive up to my ear, I can hear motor-like sounds. But after 8 - 10 seconds, the vibrations diminish and totally stop, and the sound goes away also. The light stays on, but steady, not blinking.

My goal was to do data recovery, but this is looking doubtful.

The question for the guru's here: from watching you tube videos on how to disassemble this drive, it appears that this is a regular 2.5" SATA drive with a SATA to USB interface board on it. My gut feeling is that removing the drive from the case, removing the USB to SATA interface board and plugging it directly into a docking station has a very low likelihood of success. Agreed?

Mahalo,

Harry Z

 

[thecomputerguy]

Step one is to get it out of the external enclosure... step two is to verify that the drive is mechanically bad, which in almost all cases, it is mechanically bad. Step three is to send it off to data recovery and make sure you price it for the client high enough that you get a good cut to facilitate it for them.

Normally I'd quote $500+-$700+ and then + parts then send it off to 300DDR. Remember you'll need another external to put the data on and then the client will have no idea what to do with the data once it's recovered so you're going to have to put it back in place for them too.

Account for all of that in the pricing.

 

[lcoughey]

Likely a firmware issue, if stays spinning and not making any odd noises. Either way, definitely not doable without professional tools.

 

[Haole Boy]

@thecomputerguy yeah I tried this earlier in my business, but no one was interested in doing this for anything more than a couple hundred bucks. Then I switched to just telling them to send it themselves to 300DDR, and again. very few takers. So, my customer set really, really wants their data recovered until they learn it's going to cost them money.

@lcoughey Thanx. This is the feedback I was looking for. Much appreciated.

 

[NJW]

I plugged it into my Linux Mint 19.1 machine via USB cable. I can see the light go on (steady, not blinking). And it does not show up in Nemo.

What does dmesg show? (sudo dmesg in a terminal.)

 

[Philippe]

So, my customer set really, really wants their data recovered until they learn it's going to cost them money

Lol, so true. Exactly the same here: never saw a customer pay big $$ for recovery (residential).

 

[Markverhyden]

@thecomputerguy So, my customer set really, really wants their data recovered until they learn it's going to cost them money.

Well, one can say the same about business customers to a certain extent. I might get an out of business hours call - "<insert something important> isn't working. I need to to come over right away". The urgency seem to automagically melt away when they find out the costs.

 

[mikeroq]

I had a few people over the years send off for recovery.

1st was a guy's home PC and we sent the drive off and got it recovered.
2nd was a computer from a Sonic location, sent off and it was also recovered.
3rd was another business computer and the recovery wasn't as ideal but did get some stuff back.
4th was an external drive that had failed. They were unable to recover. Also had to get a doner board.

I had a few other people that we offered to send off but they didn't want to pay for it.

Sometimes with these externals it's a problem with the USB controller board. But it seems like many of these have the USB directly on the drive board.

I would at least hook the drive up directly via SATA and verify the behavior is the same.

 

[HCHTech]

We get a few takers each year, surprisingly. We just sent a drive off yesterday - solo-preneur architect, 7-year old Dell Latitude, never did a backup....in 7 years.....of her livelihood-producing machine. The drive spins up without any ugly noises & Linux can see it, but ddrescue hangs a few minutes in with 0 bytes recovered, gsmartcontrol hangs when trying to look at the disk. I hope it's expensive - that's some olympic-level stupidity right there.

 

[Haole Boy]

What does dmesg show? (sudo dmesg in a terminal.)

I've never used that command before. It generated over 1k lines of output and I have no idea what I'm looking at. I'm attaching it in case you have a couple of minutes and would like to provide some feedback on what is in the file.

Mahalo

 

[NJW]

I've never used that command before. It generated over 1k lines of output and I have no idea what I'm looking at. I'm attaching it in case you have a couple of minutes and would like to provide some feedback on what is in the file.

dmesg shows kernel messages, without having to dig into the log files (oversimplified ...). The first column is the timestamp of the line, in seconds since kernel boot, by default; add option -T after the command to format time in human-readable local date-time.

For situations like your USB drive problem, it can often give useful debug information. You're only interested in messages since the drive was plugged in. The last few lines of your attachment:

[  194.646261] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Read Capacity(16) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[  194.646267] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense not available.
[  194.886300] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Read Capacity(10) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[  194.886305] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense not available.
[  194.986261] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] 0 512-byte logical blocks: (0 B/0 B)
[  194.986266] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] 0-byte physical blocks
[  195.066258] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
[  195.066263] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 28 00 00 00
[  195.226234] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Incomplete mode parameter data
[  195.226244] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
[  195.734215] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Read Capacity(16) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[  195.734219] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense not available.
[  195.994192] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Read Capacity(10) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
[  195.994197] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense not available.
[  196.190318] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is on
[  196.190323] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 00 20 b7 49
[  196.438264] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk

Perhaps not particularly useful in this case, except as confirmation, but clearly the problem is that the drive is not reporting any information to the system. DID_ERROR indicates that the drive (usually the drive itself, afaik, not the USB interface) aborted both Read Capacity commands.

Sometimes this can be a poor USB interface adapter or conflicts with the Linux UAS (USB Attached SCSI) driver, but that's a different rabbit hole. (Seagate USB drives do have a history of quirky USB adapters.)

Edit to add: Even though the drive is not playing, it often possible to mount the drive for reading – in this case, sudo mount /dev/sdc /mnt/<mount-point>, where <mount-point> exists and is empty. I doubt that would work for you here as the drive is clearly struggling, at best.

 

[lcoughey]

If you can't easily clone it, you should never try to mount it.

If the data is of value, do not attempt to mount, scan or anything. These 5TB Seagate drives are a huge PITA with professional data recovery equipment in most cases...making it worse only increases the cost and decreases the chances of a clean recovery.

If the clients says that it isn't worth the base rate of a pro ($450 CAD / ~$360 USD at my lab, I assume $300 USD at 300 Dollar Data Recovery), then hammer away. But, be sure to get them to sign off that they understand that your efforts may kill any chance of a pro afterwards.

 

[Haole Boy]

Sorry for the delay in responding here... did not realize there were more comments.

The drive has been returned to its owner with recommendation for professional data recovery services. But it's doubtful she will pursue that option.

Again, mahalo to all who replied.

Harry Z