2 TB Western Digital

[soccercake7]

My external Hard Drive just stopped yesterday morning while it was playing music while I was in the shower. Since then, it refuses to start up. It is recognized in device manager and disk management as "unallocated" but it never gets assigned a drive letter. I realized it wasn't even spinning, so tore open the external casing and mounted it up in my PC. It spins now so it must have been a power/usb issue.

It just spend 7 hours analyzing the disk with TestDisk. Now it just has the following options: add partition, load backup, enter to continue.



I'm still at work; but when I get home I can upload log file and screenshot. Just have my wife update me on the status and she took a phone-picture =p

I was the under the impression I might have the option to do a 'deeper search' to try to find some sort of partition. This is my first time using TestDisk so I'm sure I'm mistaken. What does it mean that those are my 3 options have an 'Analyze' and what do they mean?

Thanks for any help!

[remy]

What model of WD ?

[soccercake7]

Essentials.

And I hit continue then I was able to "search deeper". Sorry for stupid question. Didn't notice that continue step in the step by step guide.

Apologies! Wish me luck! Odd thing: photorec sees a partition and testdisk hasn't yet.....

[Fiona]

recognized in device manager and disk management as "unallocated" but it never gets assigned a drive letter.

Unallocated means that there is no partition.
If there is no partition, then it's not possible to assign any drive letter
Did you use the 64-bit version?
It's only intended on systems lacking WOW64 (Windows on Windows) as some features are missing (like Itanium machine).
Otherwise use the 32-bit version.
I'd need infos from Analyse, Quick and if nothing is found Deeper Search.
When TestDisk finds a partition, please check it and press p to list your files.
You'll get back to the previous screen pressing q for Quit.

Please let me know.

Fiona

[remy]

Hardware encryption on these models. You have to use your enclosure. perhaps if enclosure power as defect you may be able to supply power to the sata-poxer connector externaly and just connect sata-data to the sata-usb board. The encryption chipset is on the sata-usb board, so you need it.

There's only very few models of My book essential without encryption. Give screenshots of the partition you see with photorec also.

[soccercake7]

oof.

Did analyze search and deeper search. Nothing found. Would it be best to actually make a new volume out of the whole thing and hope for file recovery? At least a partition would be found at that point.


Running analyze on 32-bit version since I do have wow64 it seems...thanks

[soccercake7]

Thanks.

I could have RMA'd the thing before I opened it.

I took it out of my PC and went back thru the usb/power housing (glad I didn't toss it) and used the 32-bit version and it saw my partition. I did the 'Write' and rebooted. I now have a drive letter and all my files.

My next question would have to be:

Anyway to lose the External encryption housing? At this point, I might as well mount it in my PC instead of a ghetto external.

And, out of habit and before I realized I had a drive letter and all my files, I went back into testdisk and I have Boot Sector: OK and Backup Boot Sector: BAD. Sectors are not identical. Do I need to rebuild BS? What do I need to do? At the moment, I'm doing a chkdsk /r on it...


LOG: https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?ci ... 8VbuOufgSY

[remy]

If you have your files, save it in another place, remove the disk from the WDbox, re-format the disk (eventually do a 1-pass zero before), and copy the file again on it.

If you had a power problem, verify your disk had'nt hardware problem since.

[Fiona]

Anyway to lose the External encryption housing?

You should copy/backup your data to another non encrypted disk.
Build your disk internally.
Use your disk management console to repartition and reformat it to normal standard.
Copy your data back.
It makes any run of disk utilities like chkdsk needless.

Nevertheless, if you're trying to repair your file system?
Don't use TestDisk and Org BS, to copy your bootsector over its backup.
In some cases, the result has been that the partition appeared as RAW.
Due to that well-beloved key chip, your file system is encrypted.
So it might be possible that your file system acts different?
In case, it'd be advisable before you run chkdsk and Rebuild BS, you should backup your data.
Might be possible that Rebuild can solve the problem to sync your backup of your boot sector.
But it's only a try.

[soccercake7]

Sorry to bump but wanted to say thanks! I was able to rescue my music files. I have yet to rescue my movie files as I don't have 1 TB of storage available. When I do, I'll format it and try to make it non-encrypted and internal.

Anyway, all this happened about the same time my brand new PC arrived which had problems itself. The combination of freezes and blue screens (due to memory) probably didn't help, or perhaps caused, this poor hard drive's issues.

My PC seems okay now. Have to RMA one of the RAM sticks. (CyberPowerPC gaming rig by the way. Can't say I recommend it)

So sometimes I plug up this hard drive to watch a film or TV show and it's fine. Except, if I leave it pluged in and turn off the PC, whenever the PC turns on, it cannot. It takes minutes on detecting drives. Then it makes my PC boot into recovery console. If I unplug this drive, and turn on the computer, it starts fine.

Given my history in this thread with this drive and my history with this computer (brand new in march) that blue screens and freezes out of the box since I got it and only recently subsided with one stick of RAM, I'm utterly confounded. What a scenario! New computer and external hard drive both have issues. Found pc issue (bad RAM) and hard drive issue (bad boot sector), but there is still a hint of past problems.

Hopefully once I find the space to completely backup and format this drive, I can eleminate the issues. But there's still a part of me that thinks either this hard drive screwed up my computer or my computer screwed up this hard drive.

Such strange events since March...