WD Easystore 8tb

[DiskGuy]

Hi guys my WD Easystore 8tb HDD became unallocated. May I know how should I proceed to use TestDisk to recover my partition/lost files?

[recuperation]

Hi guys my WD Easystore 8tb HDD became unallocated. May I know how should I proceed to use TestDisk to recover my partition/lost files?

Cross-read the manual:

https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf

Read
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

which contains examples how to recover lost partitions and repair a damaged FAT/NTFS boot sector.

[DiskGuy]

Hi guys my WD Easystore 8tb HDD became unallocated. May I know how should I proceed to use TestDisk to recover my partition/lost files?

Cross-read the manual:

https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf

Read
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

which contains examples how to recover lost partitions and repair a damaged FAT/NTFS boot sector.

Hi apologies for not reading the guide first and thank you for the suggestion. I sent the HDD to data recovery service for a diagnosis and found out one of the 8 read head is damaged. Is this still safe to do without causing further damage to the HDD?

[BitterColdSoul]

I sent the HDD to data recovery service for a diagnosis and found out one of the 8 read head is damaged. Is this still safe to do without causing further damage to the HDD?

You mean, you sent it to a data recovery service for a diagnosis, and now would like to try recovering the data on your own ?
If there's indeed a damaged head, short answer, no, it is not safe to do anything else on your own. However I've read that professional recovery services for helium-based HDDs (which this one probably is) was particularly expensive, so you have to decide if the data is worth the high fee. There may still be some reasonable hope to recover a good portion of the data by carefully cloning / imaging the drive with a software tool designed to deal with storage devices in bad shape, like ddrescue or HDDSuperClone. I've once imaged a 4TB drive with a bad head (it started to malfunction about halfway through the process but was probably flailing before failing for good), it looked like this. When this happens, all files which had parts or all of their sectors on the areas covered by the bad head will be incomplete or lost ; in the case of this drive, it mostly affected downloaded movies, the client for whom I did this was very happy (considering that he paid me about 1/10th of what a bona fide DR company would have billed -- before sending it to me he brought the drive to a local association where they failed to get anything at all from it).

{*} Each head covers a side of a platter, 8 heads means 4 platters with 8 sides -- but files are not written on each platter until it's filled, rather, writing alternates between platters' sides every few hundred megabytes, “in serpentine fashion” (for instance 15GB on P1/S1, then 15GB on P1/S2, ..., then, 15GB on P4/S2, then back to P1/S1 -- the actual pattern depends on each model, for instance Samsung drives tend to have much larger runs on each head), so a large file is bound to have damaged areas. In another case (my first paid recovery service actually), on a 1TB drive which was filled to about 1/4, and similarly had a bad head and was very behaving very erratically, and it became really miserable about 1/4 of the way through, luckily by that point most of the allocated data was secured ; since there were several distinct copies of most affected files on different locations of the drive, I was able to reconstruct the complete original file from two damaged ones, recovering about 100 more files that way, so I got almost 100% of the user's personal files (I only got paid 50€ for the whole thing, whereas this last task alone, which is extremely tedious, would have been billed with a major extra fee by a DR company).

[DiskGuy]

I sent the HDD to data recovery service for a diagnosis and found out one of the 8 read head is damaged. Is this still safe to do without causing further damage to the HDD?

You mean, you sent it to a data recovery service for a diagnosis, and now would like to try recovering the data on your own ?
If there's indeed a damaged head, short answer, no, it is not safe to do anything else on your own. However I've read that professional recovery services for helium-based HDDs (which this one probably is) was particularly expensive, so you have to decide if the data is worth the high fee. There may still be some reasonable hope to recover a good portion of the data by carefully cloning / imaging the drive with a software tool designed to deal with storage devices in bad shape, like ddrescue or HDDSuperClone. I've once imaged a 4TB drive with a bad head (it started to malfunction about halfway through the process but was probably flailing before failing for good), it looked like this. When this happens, all files which had parts or all of their sectors on the areas covered by the bad head will be incomplete or lost ; in the case of this drive, it mostly affected downloaded movies, the client for whom I did this was very happy (considering that he paid me about 1/10th of what a bona fide DR company would have billed -- before sending it to me he brought the drive to a local association where they failed to get anything at all from it).

{*} Each head covers a side of a platter, 8 heads means 4 platters with 8 sides -- but files are not written on each platter until it's filled, rather, writing alternates between platters' sides every few hundred megabytes, “in serpentine fashion” (for instance 15GB on P1/S1, then 15GB on P1/S2, ..., then, 15GB on P4/S2, then back to P1/S1 -- the actual pattern depends on each model, for instance Samsung drives tend to have much larger runs on each head), so a large file is bound to have damaged areas. In another case (my first paid recovery service actually), on a 1TB drive which was filled to about 1/4, and similarly had a bad head and was very behaving very erratically, and it became really miserable about 1/4 of the way through, luckily by that point most of the allocated data was secured ; since there were several distinct copies of most affected files on different locations of the drive, I was able to reconstruct the complete original file from two damaged ones, recovering about 100 more files that way, so I got almost 100% of the user's personal files (I only got paid 50€ for the whole thing, whereas this last task alone, which is extremely tedious, would have been billed with a major extra fee by a DR company).

Yes, I forgot to mention that I can't afford the fee. And was just looking to salvage some data on my own as a last ditch effort.

The specialist mentioned disabling the bad head and imaging the disk. I doubt I will be able to do that. On top of the recovery fee, I need to provide him with a 10tb disk since according to him imaging a 8tb disk takes up more than 8tb of disk space.

ddrescue recovers by imaging the disk as well right? I doubt I want to buy a really expensive and large 10tb disk again.

Btw, is there a program that can read the smart data off usb? I tried crystaldiskinfo and some others but they are unable to detect the hdd attached via usb, which is on a dock.

Anyway, any suggestions of recovering data off an unallocated hdd when there's a bad read head without imaging is greatly appreciated.

[BitterColdSoul]

Yes, I forgot to mention that I can't afford the fee. And was just looking to salvage some data on my own as a last ditch effort.

How much do they ask, out of curiosity ?

The specialist mentioned disabling the bad head and imaging the disk. I doubt I will be able to do that.

I don't know if it can be done with software only methods -- since you really don't want to open the drive, which in an unclean environment means game over.
The “pro” version of HDDSuperClone may have such a feature, but I'm not sure.

On top of the recovery fee, I need to provide him with a 10tb disk since according to him imaging a 8tb disk takes up more than 8tb of disk space.

It shouldn't take more, I don't know why he said that. Well, yes, the actual space available on a drive which already has its own partitioning and filesystem structures is slightly less than the total capacity, but if the bad drive is cloned (rather than imaged -- see below) to the recovery drive, there's no such concern. Also, there's the possibility of sparse writing (see below).

ddrescue recovers by imaging the disk as well right? I doubt I want to buy a really expensive and large 10tb disk again.

Yes, but ddrescue allows to create an image in “sparse” mode (using the little known “sparse” feature available on modern filesystems), which means that totally empty clusters aren't actually allocated, which can save a tremendous amount of space. In the example I mentioned, I first cloned the 4TB drive to another 4TB drive (clone = direct transfer of sectors from a device to another device), for performance concerns (I've had performance issues when creating an image with ddrescue to a NTFS partition), then to keep a backup and repurpose the 4TB drive used for the initial cloning, I imaged that clone with ddrescue using the “-S” switch (= sparse), and since only about 500GB were ever used on the defective drive, I got a 4TB image occupying only about 500GB of space on the destination drive. If you attempt to create an image right away, preferably do so onto a Linux partition like Ext4. Last time I checked HDDSuperClone didn't have a similar “sparse writing” feature. But the “pro” version may be able to selectively recover the files / folders which you deem the most important (see below).

Btw, is there a program that can read the smart data off usb? I tried crystaldiskinfo and some others but they are unable to detect the hdd attached via usb, which is on a dock.

HD Sentinel works with USB connected drives. It's a commercial software, but it has the huge advantage of checking all connected storage devices constantly, as an unintrusive background task, keeping statistics over time and issuing a warning at the first sign of impending trouble -- which can prevent such a situation where the damage is already quite severe when noticed by the owner. It also has advanced testing procedures, which can be useful for thoroughly testing a new drive before commiting to using it to store important data (which of course doesn't make a backup unnecessary, but it can prevent from relying on a drive which is frail and flimsy to begin with and is bound to cause trouble sooner rather than later, or to corrupt data unbeknownst to the user).

Anyway, any suggestions of recovering data off an unallocated hdd when there's a bad read head without imaging is greatly appreciated.

Only quite advanced and costly methods, used by data recovery experts, allow to do that. The cheapest solution may be the combination of HDDSuperClone with a “pro” license and DMDE, as that combo supposedly allows to selectively clone/image parts of a drive containing specific files and folders of particular interest. I've never tried that, I can't comment on how efficient it is. You could ask the author for advice, either directly or on forum.hddguru.com (he goes by the nickname “maximus”, and generally chimes in whenever one of his tools is mentioned in a thread, so if you post on the forum preferably put the tool's name in the thread's title).

[BitterColdSoul]

(Sorry, I made a new post instead of editing the one I just published.)

[DiskGuy]

Yes, I forgot to mention that I can't afford the fee. And was just looking to salvage some data on my own as a last ditch effort.

How much do they ask, out of curiosity ?

The specialist mentioned disabling the bad head and imaging the disk. I doubt I will be able to do that.

I don't know if it can be done with software only methods -- since you really don't want to open the drive, which in an unclean environment means game over.
The “pro” version of HDDSuperClone may have such a feature, but I'm not sure.

On top of the recovery fee, I need to provide him with a 10tb disk since according to him imaging a 8tb disk takes up more than 8tb of disk space.

It shouldn't take more, I don't know why he said that. Well, yes, the actual space available on a drive which already has its own partitioning and filesystem structures is slightly less than the total capacity, but if the bad drive is cloned (rather than imaged -- see below) to the recovery drive, there's no such concern. Also, there's the possibility of sparse writing (see below).

ddrescue recovers by imaging the disk as well right? I doubt I want to buy a really expensive and large 10tb disk again.

Yes, but ddrescue allows to create an image in “sparse” mode (using the little known “sparse” feature available on modern filesystems), which means that totally empty clusters aren't actually allocated, which can save a tremendous amount of space. In the example I mentioned, I first cloned the 4TB drive to another 4TB drive (clone = direct transfer of sectors from a device to another device), for performance concerns (I've had performance issues when creating an image with ddrescue to a NTFS partition), then to keep a backup and repurpose the 4TB drive used for the initial cloning, I imaged that clone with ddrescue using the “-S” switch (= sparse), and since only about 500GB were ever used on the defective drive, I got a 4TB image occupying only about 500GB of space on the destination drive. If you attempt to create an image right away, preferably do so onto a Linux partition like Ext4. Last time I checked HDDSuperClone didn't have a similar “sparse writing” feature. But the “pro” version may be able to selectively recover the files / folders which you deem the most important (see below).

Btw, is there a program that can read the smart data off usb? I tried crystaldiskinfo and some others but they are unable to detect the hdd attached via usb, which is on a dock.

HD Sentinel works with USB connected drives. It's a commercial software, but it has the huge advantage of checking all connected storage devices constantly, as an unintrusive background task, keeping statistics over time and issuing a warning at the first sign of impending trouble -- which can prevent such a situation where the damage is already quite severe when noticed by the owner. It also has advanced testing procedures, which can be useful for thoroughly testing a new drive before commiting to using it to store important data (which of course doesn't make a backup unnecessary, but it can prevent from relying on a drive which is frail and flimsy to begin with and is bound to cause trouble sooner rather than later, or to corrupt data unbeknownst to the user).

Anyway, any suggestions of recovering data off an unallocated hdd when there's a bad read head without imaging is greatly appreciated.

Only quite advanced and costly methods, used by data recovery experts, allow to do that. The cheapest solution may be the combination of HDDSuperClone with a “pro” license and DMDE, as that combo supposedly allows to selectively clone/image parts of a drive containing specific files and folders of particular interest. I've never tried that, I can't comment on how efficient it is. You could ask the author for advice, either directly or on forum.hddguru.com (he goes by the nickname “maximus”, and generally chimes in whenever one of his tools is mentioned in a thread, so if you post on the forum preferably put the tool's name in the thread's title).

They asked for close to 8k bucks.

I just placed an order for a 4tb HDD yesterday, would've ordered a 6tb one and try your suggestions. Oh well. At least I know the data is technically recoverable by specialists. The data is valuable to me in a sentimental/nostalgia way but I can live without them. Maybe one day I will spend the money, but now its not a very high priority.

I will still try some of the suggestions, but I have a feeling the chance is quite slim.

What about just an index of the files/folders? Including areas not accessible by the bad read head? With the file index I can at least rebuild part of my collection.

Thanks a lot for your input!

[BitterColdSoul]

What about just an index of the files/folders? Including areas not accessible by the bad read head? With the file index I can at least rebuild part of my collection.

If it's a Windows NTFS partition, ddru_ntfsbitmap, included in ddr_utility, a bunch of companion tools for ddrescue made some years ago by the same author as HDDSuperClone (but no longer developed or supported as he recalled in the aforementioned thread about the WD40EFRX), allows to extract two key filesystem structures : the $Bitmap which indicates which sectors are allocated and which are free (it can be used to generate a “mapfile” for ddrescue to clone / image only the actually allocated areas rather than the whole drive's sectors, which, combined with sparse writing, can further reduce the size of the recovery and help concentrate the effort and the drive's strain on areas that actually matter rather than wasting them on unused portions or deleted files), and the $MFT which contains all metadata and allocation information for all files on the partition. If this file can be fully recovered, then it can be parsed to generate a list in plain text ; I did some tests once with a tool called MFT2CSV.