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Re: Data Recovery of 3TB Hard Drive

Posted: 25 Aug 2021, 16:07
by 3TbHDD
Recapping:

External hard drive; 3TB Western Digital, p/n WDBWLG0030HBK. Connected to a windows 7 computer via a usb cable and also a power cable. Hard drive always spins up normally and sounds healthy; it does not make any clicking or grinding noises. Ruled out USB cable and USB port as problem.

Problem:

* HDD working perfectly. Then the next day, HDD showed up in Disk Management like this: Disk 1 Basic 2794.49 GB Online. (F:) 2794.49GB RAW Healthy (Primary Partition)

* Then the following day it showed up in Disk Management like this: Disk 1 Basic 2794.49 GB Online. (F:) 2794.49 GB, unable to finish mounting, blue revolving loading or thinking symbol, Disk Management window says (Not Responding).

* testdisk was producing a massive 800+ gb error log; was instructed to stop, and to use smartmontools, so I did and the result was:

* smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-w64-mingw32-win7-sp1] (sf-7.2-1)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

Smartctl open device: /dev/sdf [SAT] failed: \\.\PhysicalDrive5: Open failed, Error=2

The above error log was produced while the drive was still successfully mounted. It has not been able to mount again since then.

* Remaining question: how to recover my data?

Thanks.

Re: Data Recovery of 3TB Hard Drive

Posted: 25 Aug 2021, 17:31
by recuperation
Please use the information linked below to get access to your external WD drive for smartmontools.

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10910

If everything fails, use Crystaldiskinfo alternatively.