My first in-prod corrupted hard drive problem
A Swiss biopharma ICT engineer traced a production MS SQL backup failure through EDR, VSS, and Windows corruption to a magnetically weakened HDD sector — recovered by a $90 tool that looked like a scam.
What Matters
- HDD Regenerator recovered bad sectors by rewriting with strong magnetic patterns, forcing drive firmware to remap physically marginal sectors to spare pool.
- SQL Server page checksums confirmed no silent data corruption post-recovery; only weakly magnetized sectors, not scratched platters.
- The triggering event was a vendor technician’s SQL patch causing heavy I/O on audit pages untouched for years, exposing already-decayed sectors.
- RAID would not have helped: silent page corruption replicates faithfully to every mirror before detection.
- Dell shipped a replacement drive under warranty but explicitly declined any data recovery assistance despite active enterprise support contract.
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EaseUS paid version failed; Windows
dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealthdetected corruption but could not repair it. - [HN: @jtchang] No mention of SMART diagnostics having flagged the drive beforehand — a key missing early-warning layer.
- [HN: @benlivengood] Article’s RAID analysis is likely wrong; most RAID controllers begin resilvering or surfacing read errors during scrubs before silent corruption propagates fully.
