All of a sudden, one of my external drives is inaccessible. Anybody know how to retrieve data from it? I took the drive (WD Elements) out of the case, intending to hook it up to a SATA enclosure, but it's got what seems to be unremovable hardware blocking access.
Hello boweasel!
The WD Elements doesn't have hardware encryption. It is, though, in RAW format. The cyclic redundancy check would be confirming it. This means it has had errors/damage to its partition table, hence the system can't read it correctly and doesn't allow access to it. The problem therefore has not been in the enclosure. But from removing the drive now the warranty has bee voided and the device can't be RMA-ed for replacement. :/
A RAW drive is hard to retrieve data from. You could a data recovery software on your own but it has risks to your drive and the data on it. You could try booting into an Ubuntu/Linux Live CD to try and access the drive. If the data is truly valuable then may be you should consider professional data recovery. WD has partners in the field.
Best of luck!
CK_WD
Hi boweasel,
Put the drive back into the enclosure, plug it in and post a screenshot of how your drive looks in Windows Disk Management and MiniTool Partition Wizard 9.1 Free Edition.
Free download Magic Partition Manager Software, partition magic alternative, free partition magic, partition magic Windows 7 and server partition software - Partition Wizard Online
If partitions had been lost or the MBR code has been corrupted we can try recovering the partitions/ writing the MBR with Partition Wizard.
If it doesn't work then we can try other data recovery software.
At the moment I don't see the need for professional data recovery.
Okay, here's a shot of Disk Management plus a few from Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics. It is the G: drive.
Why I took the drive apart - Years ago I'd had success with a similar problem by removing the drive, removing some bracketing piece of hardware and connecting the Female data port on the drive to a male SATA attachment on my own enclosure. This particular drive has what seems like permanent hardware preventing access to the power and data connectors. I don't care about voiding any warranty since every piece of failed computer equipment I've owned always seems to wait until one month after the warranty expiration.
Downloading the MiniTool Partition Wizard now - will post back with results. And thanks.
For heaven's sake remove all other external drives from your machine.
Run Partition Recovery Wizard , on your faulty drive Do a Quick Scan. At the end of the quick scan if partitions are found, post the screenshot of the "partitions found" Window. Select the partitions by putting a tick mark against those. View the preview map at the bottom of that Window. Does it show your drive as before? If yes click on Finish and then Apply.
If you can't carryout anything, close Partition Wizard and safely remove your faulty drive.
I shall see your post after another eight hours and we shall continue thereafter.
That's a bit of a quandary - first off I assumed I'd need another drive for some sort of recovery, and I have little DASD left on my C: drive. Secondly, I'm currently using the 2TB drive to download the entire second season of the show 24, which we plan to watch non-stop on Thanksgiving. Will disconnecting that external drive make the download start from the beginning? We're about 6 hours into a 30+GB download.
Can I still do the quick scan with the other external still attached?
The screenshot I posted above for Partition Recovery Wizard is what I see when I open the tool. I see nothing listed anywhere that's called Quick Scan. Perhaps it's really now called something else?
Last edited by boweasel; 24 Nov 2015 at 16:35.
I'm 'guessing' that what you mean by Quick Scan is the Surface Test. I disconnected the other external and attempted to run that test on the problem drive. I attempted it multiple times, always with the same result about 3 seconds after I hit 'start'.
I think you should have completed whatever you wanted to download. If not you may resume the download and complete it. Afterwards plug in your faulty drive only and attempt a Partition Recovery.
In your case it is more or less clear that it is the bad sectors which prevents access to the drive.You may need to do a sector to sector cloning to another good drive and perform data recovery on the cloned drive.
Before that we want to make sure that partition loss is not the cause. With your faulty drive plugged in run MiniTool Partition Wizard. On the left pane under Actions and Wizards, you will see Partition Recovery Wizard listed. Click on Partition Recovery Wizard > Next > select your external drive to be recovered > next > Full Disk > Next > Quick Scan.
Allow Quick scan to complete and post the screenshot of Partitions Found.
If Quick Scan moves slowly and takes more than five minutes, do not persist. Cancel it and quit Partition Wizard.
You should now have a more than 1TB formatted good drive for cloning. I would recommend a 1.5 TB or a 2TB drive so that the drive can be identified easily during the cloning. When you are ready with an empty drive start cloning using System Rescue CD.
Read this and understand. Best method/tool for cloning a failing HDD for Data Recovery?
If you have any doubts ask for help.
Last edited by jumanji; 24 Nov 2015 at 23:34.
Yes, it was moving slowly so I cancelled after 5 minutes. Screenshot below
Wow... quite a lot to digest in that link. You said 'Read this and understand'. The 'reading' went just fine. The understanding... was not total.
An empty 1.5 to 2TB drive is not something I have hanging around just waiting to be used. I rather thought the 1TB+ free space I have on my 2TB drive would be used for recovery, but I bow to your much greater knowledge. I'll have to brave the Black Friday crowds (Wednesday won't work for me to do any shopping) and buy a new one.
'If you have any doubts ask for help'. I can almost guarantee that questions and doubts are gonna come up. Meanwhile I'll download and burn System Rescue CD.
So, if I understand, we're not attempting any recovery; we're just using a tool to copy the viable data from the failed drive to a brand new one. What gives me pause is the incessant read errors I got when running the MiniTool Partition Wizard surface test. However I previously downloaded another tool called M3 RAW Drive Recovery, and it looked like everything was there. I'm really only interested in the documents and pictures of the failed drive, and I could do previews of the pictures and they were fine. The previews of the documents were partly unreadable because the original documents were in Word and the previews were in wordpad. The fly in the ointment there was the 79 bucks they wanted for a license to get the previews recovered to another drive.
The Linux thing is also interesting. I've got a Windows 7 desktop in the basement with a non-genuine OS. I don't see why I couldn't download LinuxLive onto it and see if I could access the drive data through it.
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