Seagate harddrive unmounted, gives "daemon inhibited"?

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For most cases, step 1 of all spinning disk related problems is run Spinrite. It's a hard drive maintenance and recovery tool. It is a paid app so be prepared for that. They do have a good return policy though.

If it is a MAC, you'll need to get this plugged directly into a PC (not through USB) since it doesn't work with the MAC BIOS.

This is all assuming that the drive is still being detected by the BIOS and is powering on.

Hope this helps

Doltknuckle

Posted 2011-05-19T16:33:41.380

Reputation: 5 813

1spinrite is used to analyse/test working hard drives.. not used to fix borken ones. in this case it wont even help him. – Piotr Kula – 2012-01-04T10:36:35.547

@ppumkin - If the hardware is bad, you are right, there is nothing that can be done by a local user. If the drive can read the platter, Spinrite will do a sector by sector read of the data and try to recover it. It's a last ditch effort before you either call in an expensive data recovery export or give up and trash the drive. – Doltknuckle – 2012-01-06T19:21:06.043

@ppumkin - So what do you suggest? Your comment above talks about going to hddguru which is mainly a collection of free software drive utilities. If there is a mechanical or electrical problem, you don't want to use anything on that site because it may cause a bad drive to fail. The only thing I think would be useful is the scenario you mention is the Raw Copy Tool. It will copy of the contents of the platter to a working drive so you can then use other software titles to re construct your data. – Doltknuckle – 2012-01-06T20:32:53.420

Just to be clear to everyone, Spinrite is designed to be used on drives without mechanical or electrical problems. It does best when you are trying to recover a bad sector or a mangled file. If the drive is clicking, don't bother. The drive is too damaged to use this software title. – Doltknuckle – 2012-01-06T20:36:35.863

1@Doitknuckle - Sorry i meant the HDDGuru Forums. There are many professionals there form all over the world. Ye- spinrite it only good to refresh sectors on a non failing, or not suspected to fail drive. Rendering spinrite useless, because who refreshed sectors now a days? In my whole career of recovering data never did once spinrite manage to accomplish anything worth talking about. If it is software related, spinrite wont fix it, if its hardware, spinrite wont fix it, and this forum is not for data recovery, hdd guru forum is. And if the disk is unmountable.. how will spinrite help? – Piotr Kula – 2012-01-06T20:54:19.850

@ppumkin - I've had multiple instances of spinrite saving a computer. I've also have had multiple instances where spinrite does absolutely nothing. It depends on the condition of the drive and what is actually wrong. I've had un-mountable volumes come back after spinrite found some bad sectors in the first 1% of the drive. Just attempting to read the first few sectors can tell you a lot of what is going on. If spinrite has problems reading the drive, then it's probably a mechanical/electrical issue and outside the skill level of most users. – Doltknuckle – 2012-01-06T22:55:53.233

There is nothing worse than spending a ton of money on expensive data recovery when all that was wrong was a bad sector. That's the only thing that spinrite will prevent. It can tell you in about 5 minutes if the drive needs to go to an expert or not. – Doltknuckle – 2012-01-06T23:05:32.187

2Well I am glad you can asses that situation, because many times .. I got hard drives that were rammed to death with spinrite and had to replace heads.. when a simple PIO mode with CRC disabled will get the data back within hours/days and the HDD will still live to tell another story. Did not mean to offend you.. I just dont like spinrite. – Piotr Kula – 2012-01-06T23:34:32.673

Couldn't agree more with ppumkin here, exactly my experience. From where I'm standing - a couple of GNU tools and a few tweaks are going to accomplish a lot more than an infinite amount of Spinrite instances. This piece of software is simply already redundant. You clearly do not need it in order to properly deal with bad sectors nowadays. Also, +1 for hddguru, a good place to get pointed in the right direction and grab some technical knowledge along the way. – XXL – 2012-01-07T00:58:28.520

You need to be more specific: How old is that thing? Do you hear the disk spinning when you plug it in? What is "not working" on Windows? Is it recognizing the drive and just not showing it or are you getting no output at all? What did you mean by "parallel" in your original post? Parallels.app, the virtualization software, or do you mean that you used the disk both on the Mac and Windows? – slhck – 2011-05-19T21:29:11.077

Do you have a non-Apple computer you can plug it in to? One good test is to see if it's detected by BIOS. If it is detected then it's likely a mechanical fault and whilst a repair would be possible it'd have to go to a specialist hard drive repair center. If it's not detected in BIOS then it's likely the controller board which can be replaced fairly easily if you can source a replacement board. You could also try that old trick of freezing your drive see if that brings it back to life (it's normally temporary though if it works) – chunkyb2002 – 2011-05-19T21:35:11.127

1The parameter is incorrect tends to indicate serious drive damage in windows . 888 gb is also a VERY unusual size. – Journeyman Geek – 2011-05-20T02:25:42.130

goto hddguru.com - they will help you. – Piotr Kula – 2012-01-04T10:36:53.050

Seagate harddrive unmounted, gives "daemon inhibited"?

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