6d ago

help recover data from defective harddisk

Hi,

I have a Western digital 'WD My Passport' external usb harddisk and it has become defective in some way.

When I connect it to windows I've managed to get access to it before, but it was really sluggush to navigate in and it would fail to open certain folders and files. Now I cannot get windows to recognize it al all. It powers on and windows says something like 'setting up deveice', but nothing more happens.

If I open windows 'disk management' the drive shows up as 'Disk 1', 'Unknown', 'Not initialized'.

I wes reccomended a tool called Recuva (https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva), but since windows doesn't recognize the disk I cannot tell the tool where to look for files to recover.

I've also tried a tool called TestDisk (https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download), but it doesn't see the drive.

Can anyone help please? :)

Thanks

10 comments

First of all, if you're here, can afford it and the data is important enough to you, please pursue a professional service. (At least a couple hundred, depending on size)
If the data is important and you simply can't afford it and won't in the future or the data is just not that important, read on.
In a lot of cases you get one chance to make an image, please seriously consider professional services
First, remove the drive from the enclosure, Google model + "disassembly", you want to bypass the enclosures shitty controller. This is almost assuredly why the tools are having issues
Then you'll need a SATA to USB (or a desktop with spare SATA ports) and connect it
Now, you need to focus on making to a byte-to-byte image (NEVER do data recovery work off the physical drive). I typically use a piece of data recovery software called R-Studio (that I totally paid for.....) but Testdisk has imaging functionality https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Image_Creation
However, if you can boot to Linux, read up on and use a tool called 'ddrescue' it's specifically designed to make a drive image by first getting all the good easy stuff first and then going back with different methods over the problematic parts.
If you get a complete image without any read errors, you may have lucked out and the enclosure controller just crapped out
You will need enough space that is at least the label size of the disk you're working with. It's going to be a byte-to-byte image basically an exact mirror of the drive regardless of if there's data in a sector or not, so if the disk is 500GB the resulting image will be 500GB.
Once you have as much of a complete image as you can, then you are safe to work off that image as much as you need (though for extra safety id make a copy of it)
- Out of interest, do recovery services look at the data they've recovered? I'd rather not have them potentially seeing all the pirated content alongside the personal data I need to recover.
  
  I can't tell you for sure, I don't actually work in data recovery I just learned a lot about it because of...dumb decisions lmfao
  But from what I've gleaned, they generally don't seek it out, but their tools will show them previews n such so that they can keep on eye on if things are coming through corrupted or not
  
  Nobody cares about your horse porn. They have seen worse.

I had one if these not work because the usb port it was connected to didn't provide enough power. Try connecting it to an externality powered USB hub if you can.
If it's really broken I would open it up and connect it directly to an SATA port. If I remember correctly, inside is just a USB to SATA converter and a pretty standard drive.
- Some of the newer ones have moved away from that in the past decade. That’s how I “made” some SATA adapters years ago and got cheaper hard drives to put internally in my laptops.
  I did one in about 2015 and when I opened it up, the SATA adapter wasn’t there and instead they had put a micro USB directly onto the board of the hard drive, so you couldn’t detach it.

Is it an HDD or SSD? Do you hear any hard and repetitive clicks? Does the drive power on every time and just not get recognized by windows, or does it not always power properly?

If this is one of the physically smaller models, usually indicated by only having a USB connector (vs a separate power brick), you can probably ignore all of the advice to take it apart to use a SATA connector. These smaller ones don't have SATA, but rather a soldered USB connector.
The advice of using ddrescue, R Studio, etc is better, but still probably not going to help you if the drive doesn't show up at all. At this point, you're hoping that the drive lost its MBR/GPT (basically the table of contents) and nothing more. This really isn't too likely, although you may have some luck getting the data you care about.
Take the advice of professional recovery very seriously. You need to consider how important the data is to you, because this might be your only chance to recover it. Also, IME it's usually a couple thousand, but that really depends on the service.

Search your model and check if it is a “shingle” storage. Mine is, and it uses a method to write data that is slow and can appear damaged.
If it is, and you have been writing and deleting content, it can become slow. I use this for pure storage and it works fine. No deleting stuff though.
I avoid this tech on new drives, as it is very slow.
Good luck
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording

Buy a working model and transfer the controller to yours.
If that scares you, how much is the data worth to you?

10 comments

In a lot of cases you get one chance to make an image, please seriously consider professional services