I believe my hard drive is fried, can you help me confirm it?

ItSoundsLikeAway

Aspire - E5-576 NXGRYAA001808054417600

*apologies for the length, I wanted to give as much info and background as possible. TLDR - You can skip to the last paragraph for what I actually need*

So I bought my laptop from amazon a few years ago because the price was right. I can't remember exactly when, but I'd guess it was around 3 years ago. I'm not a gamer, but I do use Bigly BT for a bunch of torrenting because I like to download a lot of movies, TV shows, music, audio books, programs, etc. Other than using it for downloading and transferring a lot of bigger files, I use some video editing software too, like Wondershare's Filmora, OBS studio, ACDSee Luxea, Moo0 Video Cutter and Handbrake. I have a few different media players, but rarely watch anything on the laptop. I don't have much else on there in terms of apps or programs, pia's VPN, mega and TOR browser. At the time, I chose the Aspire because it had a 1TB hard drive. Around Summer in 2021, I bought a Seagate 4TB external drive to start storing all of the media files I downloaded because my hard drive and smaller flash drives were all getting full. The problems started with the Seagate about a year after I bought it. It started getting really slow, then I started noticing some files were missing and a few weren't playable anymore. I did some scans that said the Seagate had a lot of bad sectors and it recommended that I back it up because it was likely to fail at any time. I forget what programs I used, there were at least 2, to try and make an image copy to my Acer's hard drive. I kept running into issues when trying to do that though, I'm not an expert but I'm guessing that the corruption on the Seagate got so bad that the programs couldn't complete a full copy. So I said screw it, I figured I'd be able to get most of what I had copied through some recovery program and I quit messing with the Seagate and went out and bought a 5TB WD Passport to copy the disc images to and store some of the media that I had already managed to copy.

Then my Acer started getting extremely slow. It was giving me an infinitely spinning circle a few times when I'd try to open Firefox or windows explorer. I got concerned because it was the same thing that happened to the Seagate, so I tried to save what I could from the hard drive and then tried to burn an image of that too. As soon as I tried creating the image, I started getting a bunch of warnings popping up. I had errors left and right, started getting warnings about bad sectors on my laptop and everything slowed down even more. I gave up on trying to get an image and just wanted to try and fix the computer. It became almost impossible to use, I'd try running a program to fix it and it wasn't even recognizing the hard drive. If I had to turn it off or restart it, sometimes I'd get a spinning circle that took hours to get past, only for windows to freeze up on me. I tried booting up in safe mode but couldn't figure it out at the time. I eventually got so frustrated because I couldn't even get into a repair mode or BIOS as all the instructions I was reading gave multiple answers on what keys to hit, F2, F10, F12, del, etc. Nothing worked, it would just give me the Acer logo and spinning dots and it stopped loading windows, even after letting it run for days.

So this happened around this past Christmas and I gave up and went back and started using my old Toshiba laptop from like 2010. Lately I've been getting back into editing videos again but the process is just so much slower and more difficult on this ancient computer. So Last week I got the Acer out and decided to give fixing it another shot. I finally got into a 2nd screen after reading in another post on here that FN + 2 worked sometimes. I knew the disc wouldn't be recoverable, but I was hoping I could just reformat everything and start over. I've tried downloading the windows 10 and 11 versions of the installation media and then both versions of the ISO. I was able to get through a few more steps and try to install it, reset it or repair it, but nothing is working. I've come to the conclusion that my hard drive is likely fried and irreparable, but I wanted to confirm that I'm correct in my assumption and it isn't something else that could be causing me these problems before I go spend money on a new hard drive. I'd also appreciate it if someone could confirm for me that the picture of the hard drive specs I'm going to post below (1st pic), will be compatible with my Aspire. I tried to get as many pictures as I could of the different results I was getting and whatever gave information about my computer, so hopefully that's enough for someone to judge whether or not it's my hard drive that's dead. If there's any other info that's needed, just ask and I'll do my best to get it.

Thanks,

Josh

StevenGen

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/687481/i-believe-my-hard-drive-is-fried-can-you-help-me-confirm-it

Your HDD is fried and unusable, unless you want whatever data that is recoverable from these old drives you need to take the drives to a professional data recovery place, btw I had the same problems with a SATA III 2TB external drive that its head was damaged and unworkable, and my only option was to take this drive to a recovery tech, as these specialist recovery techs are really good and they managed to recover 99.99% of my valuable data on my drive, don’t know if it will be the same for you, but it will cost you, as these data recovery places are not cheap.

Your Aspire E5-576 is an upgraded Aspire E5-575 and came with an upgraded CPU of either a 7th or an 8th Gen Intel CPU, the 8th Gen is Win-11 compatible if you want to go that route. What I would do is update the bios to the last bios Version 1.49 and then do a clean install of Win-10, as that is the most covered and supported OS that Acer has for your laptop. When you do the clean install of Win-10, make sure that at “Where do you want to install Windows” part of the installation, you Delete the new boot drive then you install the IRST (Intel® Rapid Storage Technology) Driver Hot Fix 16.7.8.1024 driver that will recognize the new boot drive, as this is provided as a Hot Fix for this laptop drives by Intel and that is propably why you had problems before.

Then use what Acer used as this laptops boot drive which is a SATA III M.2 SSD like either the 512GB Micron-MTFDDAV512TBN or a 512GB Hynix SC308 (these drives are * e-NAND system specification, compliant with V5.0 and *Dual data rate: up to 400Mbyte/s @ 200MHz) SSD type drives, do NOT use PCIe type M.2 drives as this laptops M.2 slot is not compatible with an M.2 PCIe type drive. Then use as a slave drive a 2.5” SATA III Seagate - ST2000LM003 Barracuda (which is what Acer uses for this laptop) or if you want more storage then use an external 4TB - 3.5” HDD like you did before.

Good luck and hope this helps you out. Btw, its most likely that the reason your external 4TB 3.5" Seagate drive was damaged is because you didn't take the precautions of how to remove an external drive properly, below is the Seagate guide of how to do this properly so make sure that you follow this guide if you want to prelong an external drives lifespan 😁.

How To Safely Disconnect an External Drive from your Computer

NOTE: Disconnecting or "safe removal" of an external drive from your PC is handled by the Windows Safely Remove program. The following are the steps necessary to safely remove an external drive from your Windows computer:

Note: Failure to follow this procedure may result in data loss to an external drive.

1. Double-click on the Safely Remove icon in your Windows System Tray. This will launch the Safely Remove program.
   
   Note: In Windows this icon can sometimes be hidden. Simply click on the up arrow and proceed.
   
   
2. The Safely Remove window will display any/all detected USB/FireWire devices connected to your Windows computer. If necessary click/check the Display device components box to expand the view.
3. Click on the device (e.g., external drive) you wish to remove and click on the Stop button.
4. A confirmation window will appear. Once again, select the device you wish to remove and click on the OK button.
5. A pop-up window displays notifying you that it is now safe to remove the device. You can either close the pop-up window or it will close by itself. You can now power down/disconnect your external drive from your computer.

Note: At times while Safely Removing an external drive, Windows may show a warning that the external drive is busy and cannot be disconnected. If this occurs:

• Try again to Safely Remove the device
• Shut down your computer and then disconnect the external drive

StevenGen

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/687481/i-believe-my-hard-drive-is-fried-can-you-help-me-confirm-it

Your HDD is fried and unusable, unless you want whatever data that is recoverable from these old drives you need to take the drives to a professional data recovery place, btw I had the same problems with a SATA III 2TB external drive that its head was damaged and unworkable, and my only option was to take this drive to a recovery tech, as these specialist recovery techs are really good and they managed to recover 99.99% of my valuable data on my drive, don’t know if it will be the same for you, but it will cost you, as these data recovery places are not cheap.

Your Aspire E5-576 is an upgraded Aspire E5-575 and came with an upgraded CPU of either a 7th or an 8th Gen Intel CPU, the 8th Gen is Win-11 compatible if you want to go that route. What I would do is update the bios to the last bios Version 1.49 and then do a clean install of Win-10, as that is the most covered and supported OS that Acer has for your laptop. When you do the clean install of Win-10, make sure that at “Where do you want to install Windows” part of the installation, you Delete the new boot drive then you install the IRST (Intel® Rapid Storage Technology) Driver Hot Fix 16.7.8.1024 driver that will recognize the new boot drive, as this is provided as a Hot Fix for this laptop drives by Intel and that is propably why you had problems before.

Then use what Acer used as this laptops boot drive which is a SATA III M.2 SSD like either the 512GB Micron-MTFDDAV512TBN or a 512GB Hynix SC308 (these drives are * e-NAND system specification, compliant with V5.0 and *Dual data rate: up to 400Mbyte/s @ 200MHz) SSD type drives, do NOT use PCIe type M.2 drives as this laptops M.2 slot is not compatible with an M.2 PCIe type drive. Then use as a slave drive a 2.5” SATA III Seagate - ST2000LM003 Barracuda (which is what Acer uses for this laptop) or if you want more storage then use an external 4TB - 3.5” HDD like you did before.

Good luck and hope this helps you out. Btw, its most likely that the reason your external 4TB 3.5" Seagate drive was damaged is because you didn't take the precautions of how to remove an external drive properly, below is the Seagate guide of how to do this properly so make sure that you follow this guide if you want to prelong an external drives lifespan 😁.

How To Safely Disconnect an External Drive from your Computer

NOTE: Disconnecting or "safe removal" of an external drive from your PC is handled by the Windows Safely Remove program. The following are the steps necessary to safely remove an external drive from your Windows computer:

Note: Failure to follow this procedure may result in data loss to an external drive.

1. Double-click on the Safely Remove icon in your Windows System Tray. This will launch the Safely Remove program.
   
   Note: In Windows this icon can sometimes be hidden. Simply click on the up arrow and proceed.
   
   
2. The Safely Remove window will display any/all detected USB/FireWire devices connected to your Windows computer. If necessary click/check the Display device components box to expand the view.
3. Click on the device (e.g., external drive) you wish to remove and click on the Stop button.
4. A confirmation window will appear. Once again, select the device you wish to remove and click on the OK button.
5. A pop-up window displays notifying you that it is now safe to remove the device. You can either close the pop-up window or it will close by itself. You can now power down/disconnect your external drive from your computer.

Note: At times while Safely Removing an external drive, Windows may show a warning that the external drive is busy and cannot be disconnected. If this occurs:

• Try again to Safely Remove the device
• Shut down your computer and then disconnect the external drive

ItSoundsLikeAway

Thanks for confirming that for me! I think I just got overconfident and lazy with the Seagate because I went 10 years with a Toshiba laptop without ever having any issues, then had a 1TB WD passport for 4 or 5 years without any issues, and then probably 10 flash drives of varying sizes, also all without any issues, and I rarely used the safely remove feature much after my first flash drive. I'm not worried about recovering anything from either drive, I pretty much got most of what I wanted and the rest wasn't that important.

You'll have to excuse my ignorance, my knowledge is very limited with the actual hard drives. Everything I've learned is just what I looked up somewhere because it related to something I was doing, and hard drives hadn't really come up until I started having these issues. I did read yesterday that I can't use the PCIe drives.

• So I have a boot drive and a slave drive? I'm not sure what the difference is, but are you saying I'll need both to be able to start over with my Acer?
• I don't recall reading anything about e-NAND specs, does that mean that the specs I posted for the WD 1TB Internal SATA Hard Drive for laptops wouldn't be compatible? Is there a big difference between getting an SSD or HDD? If the dual data rate is the same thing as read/write speed, then the WD is much slower at just 150mbps, I don't see anything about MHz.
• Or is it the slave drive that I should be comparing the WD to? Because now that I look at it, it says the "form factor" is 2.5 and it's also SATA.
• Like I said, I'm not an expert with this, but after I started having issues with the 4TB Seagate and did some research online, I ended up on a subreddit that I can't even remember. They were all trashing Seagate and saying stuff like "their devices are fragile" and they "crash all the time". I mean, I know subreddits aren't everything, if you pose a question to them about windows, you'll probably get mocked for using windows instead of linux. But… at the same time, that external I had was a Seagate, and if you're saying I had a Seagate internally too, I'd be a little hesitant to trust them again after crashing on me 2 out of 2 times.