Western Digital 3 TB problem - RAW & unalocated

OK, Partition Recovery Wizard hasn't found anything significant on which it can be acted upon. The normal procedure is to go in for a Full or deep scan. It will take much longer and so we shall defer it now and get back to the drive's original placement.

Once done post a screenshot of Windows Disk Management as well as the first PW screen. Also tell us whether you see any Virtual CD drive in My Computer.

I am sure that Anshad Edavana is following this thread and will chip in at that moment. He must be waiting for you to do this. Nothing to hurry up and do it in your own normal pace.

1- ok I made a deep scan when the drive was hooked up directly into my computer, it didn't reveal more than the quick scan. (1 parition of 349GB and 2 partitions of 3MB)

2 - then I put the drive back to its enclosure, but there is still the problem that the drive is not recognized, so its back at the situation in my first post, and minitool partition recovery cannot find the drive and no partitions are visible in the storage management. SO I guess there is some kind of problem with the enclosure's PCB.

3 -Morevover yesterday WD lifeguard software was seeing 5860467632 sectors, if you multiply that by 512 you get 3001 GB, so he exact size of the disk, does that mean it is formatted in sectors of 512 bytes?

Hi

Would you please post some clear picture of your HDD enclosure ( covering the model no ) ?. We need to confirm whether this is a "Mybook Essential" model or not. If this is a regular "Mybook" model, i would also suggest buying an identical replacement and using it's USB-SATA bridge. On the other hand if it is a an "Essential" model, the USB-SATA bridge will be drive specific and you may need to transfer the bridge firmware chip also. That is not an easy job and usually the last thing i would suggest.


Also it will be worth a try to check whether data recovery softwares can recognize your files when the disk is directly connected to a SATA port.

Download trial version of "R-Studio" from Data Recovery Demo and File Recovery trial software download


Then do a recovery scan as per these instructions Data Recovery from an External Disk with a Damaged File System

If "R-Studio" can detect your files, data can be recovered without the original USB-SATA bridge. If it can't recognize a single file, original USB-SATA bridge will be mandatory.

Ok here is the picture of the enclosure I

Hi

A search with the model number suggests that this is an "Essential" model which may use a default/null password to encrypt data if user didn't set one. But i would like to check first few sectors to make sure the data is encrypted or not. You can use a freeware tool named "Bootice" to copy first 2100 sectors of the disk to a file for inspection. "Jumanji" has a nice tutorial on how to do that so i hope he will post some instructions soon ( currently i am in the middle of something ).

In the meantime, please try "R-Studio" and check whether it can find your files.

Math63 can have a look at this post Lost partitions!

In the backup dialog box you will mention the start Sector ( here sector 0) and then the number of sectors ( here 2099 since Anshad wants the first 2100sectors) That 2100*512byte size file will be saved as a bin file, if that is what Anshad wants. :))

To add to what Jumanji said, the forum won't allow uploading "bin" files so after saving the first 2100 sectors, zip it before uploading.

There is some good news. I asked for advise from a user on another forum who is highly experienced in data recovery. According to him the disk doesn't seem to be encrypted because Windows can read the partition table although the partition size is interpreted incorrectly. Windows calculates a partition's size by multiplying total number of sectors written on the partition table entry with the size of sector. When we connected your disk to an internal SATA port, we exposed it's native 512e bytes sector size so Windows used that value to calculate the partition size and interpreted the partition size as 341.39 GB. As i said earlier, when the disk is inside the enclosure, it will be treated as a disk with 4k sized sectors ( 4096 bytes ). So all the values in the partition table should be calculated with 4096 bytes sized sectors instead of 512. Since 4096 is 8 times higher than 512, we should multiply 341.39 with 8 to get the actual size of partition.

349.39 * 8 = 2795.12 GB

I would still like to see the sector dump to confirm this.

ok I run a deep scan using R-studio (demo), the drive was hookup directly to the motherboard. It took around 7 hours to finish the complete scan. R-Studio seems to be able to find the files and the directories.

I will do the test with the first sectors ASAP.