WD Hard Drive decides to fail

[Capt.no0b]

Hey all,

My 2TB USB3.0 WD My Book Essential HDD decided to fail on my today. But not in a hardware manner. Instead it's decided that the hard disk in no longer partitioned correctly and must be formatted. I was using it fine last night when I was watch shows on it while it was plugged into my WD Live TV unit, but when I plugged it into my laptop today Windows says it's not formatted. Plugged it back into the WD Live TV unit and it can no longed be found by the Live TV unit.

Tried to recover the data on it my using an program to scan the hard drive to see what could be found, and all that was there is the s*** generic WD software.

I've raised a case with WD to see whether it's the HDD, cable or just Windows and its usual difficulty.

Has this happened to anyone else? Can anyone help with data recovery?

Many thanks.

[Bicketybam]

I gather it is still under warranty?

Here is a list of Data recovery software that might be of use : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_d ... y_software

I use one that is not listed there called R-Studio which is very good. But from that list that Data Lifesaver looks interesting and may work over USB.

Aren't those WD My Book drives just normal hard drives in the custom container? If it's not under warranty any more it might be worth just cracking open the case and accessing the hdd directly, bypassing any thought of it being the cable. If it is under warranty, though you still have to weigh up the option that WD will somehow fix it without destroying the data or just by replacing the hard drive.

Basically you need to ask yourself what is worth more, the data on it or the warranty?

[Auld]

Warranty won't cover file system corruption as there is nothing physically wrong with the drive.

Recover the data, repartition the drive and everything should be fine.

[steve_rogers42]

I would try running WD's data lifeguard to see if there are any further issues, you shoul dbe able to find it on the WD support pages somewhere around here when drives drop like that it tends to have more issues, so might as well see if you have a warranty job on your hands.

[ChainsawMcP]

I had a drive failure the other day - none of my usual go-to programs could see anything - they all saw problems with the partition info.

Friend had a copy of Active@ Data recovery - dragged most/all of the 250Gb off the drive in a little over 5 unattended hours. (that's easier than me spending time recovering my own backed up stuff from other sources - and non backed up stuff from original sources...) Then a reformat and bad-block remap. Then never trust the drive again...

As always the philosophy is "There are two types of data - stuff you have backed up - and stuff you didn't need to keep anyway"

[Capt.no0b]

Thanks for the replies. I'm trying an app called WonderShare Data Recovery.

Will keep you updated.