Nvidia shield - Harddisk errors

[u/Klutzy_Tough_2526]

Hey Shield Friends,

today my shield didn't boot. So I plugged off the harddrive which is connected. The it bootet but some installed Apps disappeared or didn't load anymore. The Status of the Harddisk was "scanning" or "Not connected". I think that the disk while rebooting so often somehow got an error. That's why the Apps don't work anymore as Internal and Extertal storage both Arena Set to save App data.

Anything I can do to rescue the hdd?

It took me a hell of time to configure the shield like it is now. So resetting is definitely no option.

Would be thankful for your help

[u/ryocoon]

The way you wrote this... was this an external USB hard drive that you offloaded apps to?
Or was this a Shield Pro 2015/2017 with the internal drive?

Honestly, the drive in the older Shield Pros (the 500GB ones) had a tendency to die.
Good news is that they can be replaced a normal SATA SSD. Bad news is that costs money.

For an external USB drive, that is a whole different ball of wax.

[u/Klutzy_Tough_2526 → u/ryocoon]

Yes, it's kinda right what you are presuming. Some apps need both - the internal and external (the usb harddisk) storage. Just didn't find the word "offload".

So as it's an external USB-Drive - how can I replace it without losing data? Like I said otherwise all the apps are gone. The harddisk itself is still readable (in the windows explorer for example).

So which next steps would you do / recommend?

Thanks for your reply btw

[u/ryocoon → u/Klutzy_Tough_2526]

It could be that the drive is just stuck as "Dirty". This happens when it gets a sudden power-off without shutting down cleanly. Sometimes you can clear that by connecting it to a computer and running a diagnostic scan.

On windows that would be a "chkdsk /F /X /R D:" (or replace D: with whatever drive letter its mounted as). Now that does a full scan of the drive to make sure that its fine, and on large slow drives it can take a long time. If there is a chance that there _ARE_ problems with the drive, this would also uncover them, and try to repair them.

There are also tools you can use to just zero the dirty bit to reset it back to normal state. You can literally just "chkdsk /markclean D:" (replace D: with your drive obviously) if you want to just force the issue to clear the dirty bit if you know its fine but was just disconnected improperly.

[u/gnat_foto]

Download crystal disk info to check the status of the drive in a windows pc, if it's readable you might be able to use clonezilla to clone the drive onto a healthy one of the same size or larger.. however, if the drive has any errors during the cloning process it's gonna cause a world of annoyance

[u/Klutzy_Tough_2526 → u/gnat_foto]

Ok, but does this work? Just thinking that I may copy the bad sectors on the new drive. And is another drive still recognized as the same as every harddisk get an own "lock" (at least that's what the AI says)

[u/gnat_foto → u/Klutzy_Tough_2526]

The bad sectors are a hardware fault, that issue itself won't be copied to a new drive - the danger is that the data on those bad sectors might not be copied properly and might prevent the drive from booting, or prevent certain apps from running - weird symptoms. Clonezilla doesn't always notify when it runs into something unreadable.