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I have a Western Digital MyBook External USB drive that stopped working. I removed it from the case and used a SATA to USB adapter to connect the drive to my laptop. I see the drive when I open File Explorer, but when I try to access it, I get a message that the drive is not accessible. I see the drive in Disk Management listed as Disk 2 Basic 931.50 GB Online. It is assigned drive letter (E:) 931.50 GB RAW - Healthy (Basic Data Partition). I ran Analyze using Test Disk which took approximately 48 hours. When it finished, I get the following results:

TestDisk 7.2, Data Recovery Utility, February 2024 Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org> https://www.cgsecurity.org Disk \\.\PhysicalDrive2 - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - CHS 121601 255 63 Partition Start End Size in sectors
Keys A: add partition, L: load backup, Enter: to continue

There is no data listed under Partition, Start, End or Size in sectors. Do I need to add a partition? Is there any hope of recovering all the photos, videos and documents I had previously saved to this hard drive? Please let me know. Thank you.

Please post your log file.

The full testdesk.log file is too large to post, so I copied the beginning of the log and several lines, then skipped to the end and copied the last two lines of the log file.

See attached and also copied directly below:

Tue Jun 4 16:37:52 2024
Command line: TestDisk

TestDisk 7.2, Data Recovery Utility, February 2024
Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org>
https://www.cgsecurity.org
OS: Windows 8 (9200)
Compiler: GCC 11.2, Cygwin 3001.4
ext2fs lib: 1.45.3, ntfs lib: available, reiserfs lib: none, ewf lib: 20140608, curses lib: ncurses 6.1
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\PhysicalDrive0)=256060514304
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\PhysicalDrive2)=1000204886016
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\C:)=253169238016
disk_get_size_win32 IOCTL_DISK_GET_LENGTH_INFO(\\.\E:)=1000186314752
Hard disk list
Disk \\.\PhysicalDrive0 - 256 GB / 238 GiB - CHS 31130 255 63, sector size=512 - PM9A1 NVMe Samsung 256GB, S/N:3635_5430_52B4_6638_0025_3846_0000_0001., FW:36308029
Disk \\.\PhysicalDrive2 - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - CHS 121601 255 63, sector size=512 - WDC WD10 EARS-00MVWB0, S/N:D577A0A07862, FW:AB51

Partition table type (auto): EFI GPT
Disk \\.\PhysicalDrive2 - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - WDC WD10 EARS-00MVWB0
Partition table type: EFI GPT

Analyse Disk \\.\PhysicalDrive2 - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - CHS 121601 255 63
hdr_size=92
hdr_lba_self=1
hdr_lba_alt=1953525167 (expected 1953525167)
hdr_lba_start=34
hdr_lba_end=1953525134
hdr_lba_table=2
hdr_entries=128
hdr_entsz=128
check_part_gpt failed for partition
1 P MS Reserved 34 32767 32734 [Microsoft reserved partition]
check_part_gpt failed for partition
2 P MS Data 32768 1953521663 1953488896 [Basic data partition]
Current partition structure:
No FAT, NTFS, ext2, JFS, Reiser, cramfs or XFS marker
1 P MS Reserved 34 32767 32734 [Microsoft reserved partition]
1 P MS Reserved 34 32767 32734 [Microsoft reserved partition]
No FAT, NTFS, ext2, JFS, Reiser, cramfs or XFS marker
2 P MS Data 32768 1953521663 1953488896 [Basic data partition]
2 P MS Data 32768 1953521663 1953488896 [Basic data partition]

search_part()
Disk \\.\PhysicalDrive2 - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - CHS 121601 255 63
check_FAT: Bad number of sectors per cluster
check_FAT: Bad number of sectors per cluster

0 0000 0000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Unknown 278650082 29095276972858593 29095276694208512
WBFS, 14896781 TB / 13548544 TiB
0 0000 0000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Partition not added.
file_win32_pread(560,16,buffer,366397170(22807/43/7)) read err: read after end of file
file_win32_pread(560,1,buffer,366397170(22807/43/7)) read err: read after end of file
file_win32_pread(560,1,buffer,366397171(22807/43/8)) read err: read after end of file
file_win32_pread(560,1,buffer,366399202(22807/75/23)) read err: read after end of file
file_win32_pread(560,1,buffer,366397172(22807/43/9)) read err: read after end of file



file_win32_pread(560,1,buffer,1710091423(106448/68/20)) read err: read after end of file
file_win32_pread(560,1,buffer,1710091470(106448/69/4)) read err: re

chuer23 wrote: 06 Jun 2024, 18:31 I have a Western Digital MyBook External USB drive that stopped working. I removed it from the case and used a SATA to USB adapter to connect the drive to my laptop. I see the drive when I open File Explorer, but when I try to access it, I get a message that the drive is not accessible. I see the drive in Disk Management listed as Disk 2 Basic 931.50 GB Online. It is assigned drive letter (E:) 931.50 GB RAW - Healthy (Basic Data Partition). I ran Analyze using Test Disk which took approximately 48 hours. When it finished, I get the following results:

TestDisk 7.2, Data Recovery Utility, February 2024 Christophe GRENIER <grenier@cgsecurity.org> https://www.cgsecurity.org Disk \\.\PhysicalDrive2 - 1000 GB / 931 GiB - CHS 121601 255 63 Partition Start End Size in sectors
Keys A: add partition, L: load backup, Enter: to continue

There is no data listed under Partition, Start, End or Size in sectors. Do I need to add a partition?

Your log file reveals that you fooled around with TestDisk without having read the manual that came with your download or the extensive online documentation.

Is there any hope of recovering all the photos, videos and documents I had previously saved to this hard drive? Please let me know. Thank you.

I have no idea - I don't have a crystal ball.

Please provide a smartmontools log file:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10910

Sorry, I am not well versed with hard drive recovery techniques, still learning. Please see the smartmontools information I got from my hard drive.

I did not find a direct sign of dammage in your log file.

Try to duplicate your disk on another machine using ddrescue as described in the manual and try to recover your data from your cloned disk or from a file that contains the extracted disk image.

Hint:
Your disk shows a lot of load cycles:

193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 109 109 000 Old_age Always - 273998

Please use a search engine to learn about load cycles. Here is a tool that might help.
https://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/

Recuperation, thank you for the information! I will attempt to duplicate the disk and learn more about load cycles. I will let you know the outcome.
Really appreciate your help!

Hello, I ran into a problem when attempting to use ddrescue to duplicate my Western Digital disk. I set up a virtual machine running Ubuntu. The source hard drive (Western Digital My Book hard drive) is connected to my PC via SATA to USB adapter, and I have a 2TB USB external hard drive that will be the destination. On the host machine, I took both USB hard drives offline, then in Hyper-V I added the two physical hard drives using SCSI Controller setting. When I open Disks or run lsblk I can see both hard drives, but when I open Files only the 2TB hard drive is recognized. When I run the ddrescue command, I get an error saying, "Can't open input file: Permission denied". See attached screenshot. Is there any advice you can give?

Never mind, I figured it out. I needed to be logged in as root. I am running ddrescue now. Thank you.

Hello, I am still very new to this, but I was able to get ddrescue to run (see attached log.txt file) and it reported that it was able to recover 100% of my data, but now the destination disk (USB 2T external hard drive) is not recognized. I can see it when I run lsblk, but it isn't recognized in Files. I am assuming that ddrescue overwrote the NTFS file system on the destination hard drive, and I don't know now how to access the drive.

See screenshots attached showing before and after ddrescue was run. Not sure what I did wrong or the next steps, but any help would be sincerely appreciated.