Not sure if my HDD is dying or not. Mixed readings & VeraCrypt problems.

B0bbyEwing

I have 2x 4TB HDDs, both bought second hand but running them through CrystalDiskInfo & Hard Disk Sentinel they both came back as barely used & 100% good.

I started with 1 drive on which I put a VeraCrypt file container. Then another & another & another. In total I have 4x 500GB containers & then a smaller one.

At some point I remembered back many moons when I password protected a zip file & when I went to open it one day it was all of a sudden corrupt. With this in mind I bought the 2nd hard drive since it was cheap & it was to act as a copy of the initial hard drive, just in case.

All was well in the world. Containers would mount just fine. Then today came…

I went to open the smaller container & it just wouldn't. It mounted but it just wouldn't open in file explorer. "the drive cannot find the sector requested".

Tried as admin, tried with a different USB cable, different USB port. Tried in 2 external enclosures. Same issue every time.

Googling it suggested a bad hard drive yet read my opening line in this post.

So I then decided to try it installed in the PC itself, connected to the motherboard.

I started the PC up & it paused at the SMART check screen. Spat out the usual no problems for various drives but against this drive it said SMART error or something to that effect.

Once in Windows & at Disk Management it takes an absolute age to load. I have an X against the drive & it wants me to initialise it. I saw MBR & GPT mentioned although I'm pretty sure it's already GPT. Not knowing whether this would cause issues on the drive I cancelled this, turned the PC off & removed the drive, putting it back in one of the external enclosures.

I've tried the restore volume header (although I never made a backup - it said doing it from the file container was an option, which I chose) but that didn't work.

The thing is - the other 4 file containers mount AND can have their files accessed perfectly fine.

And to make it even stranger (to me) … the secondary drive is the exact same.

But I didn't duplicate drive 1 to drive 2, because in my mind that would copy over errors if there were any. What I did was open the file containers on each drive in a double drive docking station & copy the files over from one mounted container to another using TeraCopy. And as I said, they opened just fine last time.

So not really sure what to now do, if anything can be done even. As it stands I suspect I've lost everything within that one container on both drives as I can mount it, I just can't access anything on there. I'll mount it to say drive Y. I go in to This PC, I double click drive Y but then it just takes ages & spits out the error I mentioned.

Boohoo

This is a bit hard for me to follow.

Can you post up your computer details.

What Windows version do you have now and is it the same version when the backup was made?

Also what error codes do you get when you get this problem?

Have you looked in the Windows error event history to see if anything shows for the hard drive issues?

https://www.elevenforum.com/#windows-support-forums.1

That link is a very good source of info and maybe posting on there will help you.

B0bbyEwing

No problem, what about the situation is difficult for you to follow & I'll try explain better?

Windows 10 is what I'm running. Basically the PC and the OS version is the exact same as when it was all made. Nothing has changed.

I've just now checked event viewer. Didn't know of its existence. Not really sure what I'm looking for but stumbled across some disk error which says disk 3 which is the disk that I connected to the motherboard) and mentioning an error during paging.

My thinking with this is that ok a drive can go bad at any time, but 2 drives at the exact same time? Not impossible but less likely.

But not only that, I have 5 VeraCrypt file containers on each drive. 4 of those open perfectly fine in each of those drives.

The one that doesn't is the exact same file container on each drive.

Which for me is just too coincidental.

I don't really know what I'm doing / looking at / talking about but as a know-nothing-person on this, that says to me that it's something to do with VeraCrypt. I recall one time that VeraCrypt/the PC froze before the container was dismounted BUT ….. 1) I was able to open it fine on a restart (I checked because my concern was that i wouldn't be able to) and 2) that only happened on one drive … not both.

Boohoo

I know nothing about VeraCrypt but searching web some say you must use the same version as the backup file was made.

You say Zip file, is file made using the same software you are trying open/access now?

Have you a screenshot of the Event viewer details for all the errors and the ones for the HDD. It may shed some light on the issue.

If you have a spare hard drive I would back up/clone that drive and put the new copied disk away and just try to get the corrupt disk working.

Have you tried that link I put up and have you tried VeraCrypt to see if there is a help forum for that software?

flaneurs_lobster

Simplistic question, you have every right to secure your data in any way that you see fit, but do you really need 2TB of encrypted dataspace (x2)?

Does seem to be introducing an extra layer of complexity to your data storage, most people would not need anything like that amount of private space simply because they don't have that amount of private stuff.

B0bbyEwing

Well this is just weird.

Yesterday I spent hours trying to access it. Different cables, ports & all that stuff.

Today I connect it again - and it works. I did nothing different to yesterday.

So I figure for just in case purposes, I'll create a fresh VeraCrypt container & copy over the files from the one that's been causing me problems.

Get about a minute in to it being created & it spits out a sector error message & can't create a new container.

So while the existing container is open that caused me so much trouble yesterday, I'm in the process of copying everything over to my PC. Hopefully all files transfer but it's a waiting game.

New hard drive on its way. This time not a second hand one.

EDIT to add - well that answers that one. Got to 8.8% on TeraCopy & it hung. Eventually after a good few mins it skipped that file & then went to the next which it copied but then hung on the one after that. I guess there must be an issue with the drive that only really long deep scans will pickup, if at all. Still it's a bit suspect how it's on both drives & the same file container.

Boohoo

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82176817#Comment_82176817

Was files that don't work properly cloned from another drive?

Maybe if the 2 HDD are clones of a backup then that file could be corrupted as it happens on both drives

Long shot but do you have the original file?

B0bbyEwing

Nope I don't have the originals. I deleted them off my pc to free up space.

I did some more Googling & apparently, since Veracrypt file containers act as 'drives', you can get bad sector error messages when there's nothing wrong with the physical drive itself & the fault lays with the veracrypt file container.

I've tried repairing it but no can do.

Looking like this one is going to be a loss.

Might just use Bit locker & full drive encryption in future.