Hard drive had a big fail but shows no errors

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Hi all.

Recently, one of my HDDs (Seagate 12TB) had a major fail, prompting Windows to "repair" the drive on the next startup.

The main folder on this drive disappeared and found.000 showed up in its place.

I used a recovery software to see that everything in found.000 was all backed up, so no actual data loss.

(My experience with data recovery software is that the files aren't always the same when they get "recovered" anyway).

I formatted the drive and ran a comprehensive chkdisk on the drive. It ran for about 18 hours.

The results said no problems found(see below).

My problem is I no longer trust the drive.  It is about 6 years old, and I know a lot of companies would lifecycle replace it at this point anyway.

Still, it cost maybe $300 at the time and Windows seems to think it's just fine.

I can't sell it knowing that it had a massive data loss (but again that could be MS's fault for trying to repair a problem that may not have been a drive failure).

So I don't know what to do with the drive other than throw it away, despite possibly being a perfectly good HDD.

Thoughts?
Thanks.

Don't use chkdsk to check the drive. Use Seatools for Windows and do the Quick/extended test which will take a long time on a 12TB drive. Check the user guide.

https://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/

What main folder?

I just mean a folder with a significant amount of my files in it, as opposed to a small meaningless folder.

Don't use chkdsk to check the drive. Use Seatools for Windows and do the Quick/extended test which will take a long time on a 12TB drive. Check the user guide.

 

https://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/

 I actually had that installed on my computer and forgot about it.
It's running now.  

Is there a way to turn off the constant notifications about drive state changes? I don't see anything in the settings. ("Device power state has changed to idle from Active or Idle"  etc)

I just turned it off at the taskbar.  It was chirping every two minutes (I have a number of hard drives in this computer).

on 12 gig drives it has been mentioned to take a long time.  Try running this when you are not using it.  The final result is what matters 12 hrs from now.

Yeah, I agree with John; use Seatools for Windows (if the drive will still boot Windows) or if it won't boot use Seatools for DOS from a bootable USB stick or even DVD disk. 

Thanks, all. 

I started running it yesterday and then my computer locked up hard, frozen screen, no spinning wheels.
I was doing a couple of other things, so I rebooted.

I'll have to run it again overnight on the weekend.

I'll be back in touch.

OK.

I rand the Seatools Fix All Long scan.

It ran for about 30 hours and came back "passed"

I looked at the report and it just had two entries, "Started" and "Passed."
I assume that means there was nothing to report.  I was expecting something like "xxx bytes in bad sectors" etc.

I looked at drive details and really don't get much from SMART information.

So now I have a 12TB HDD that was $300 new.  According to Seagate, it has 42000 powered on hours (roughly full life expectancy from what I've read).

I don't trust it after it disappeared an enormous folder of files.

I don't feel right trying to sell it online because I might be setting the next person up for a data loss.

It seems like a total waste to throw it away.

In sum, I don't know what to do with it.

42000 powered on hours on a relatively new drive is not normal. I would contact Seagate and try to get a new drive.

This drive is 6 years old.

This is what I'm thinking.
I do all my backups on Seagate expansion drives, which I keep offsite (don't trust "the cloud" with my data).

I usually do a full backup about every 5 or 6 months.

I try to keep one drive around for incremental backups (maybe the wrong name, but backups of just what has changed since full backup), but I must admit I haven't been doing it.

I might buy one of those external drive case kits and encase the drive to sit outside the computer and act as a mini-backup device between backups.

Two things:

1. What are your system specs?
2. What were you doing at the time of the failure, and how long had it been since you'd allowed updates via restart?