Rescue Corrupted WD External HDD

Uhh -- take it to a data retrieval place and pay whatever it takes to get your data back?

And make sure your next wife doesn't do that!!

How do you know that?

Sylvia.

I would start with that HD being the only one installed in a computer, and boot with Spinrite; use recovery level 2. This ASS-u-MEs that the computer BIOS recognizes the hard drive. If that is a problem, put the HD in the freezer for maybe 5 minutes and see if it will operate; run Spinrite while the HD is still cool.

Then [in DOS] use Partinfo>save.txt to get a readable HD layout and see if there is something fishy about the partition(s); PTedit can be used to alter messed bytes. Those routines are from the good-old Partition Magic of yore.

That is rather HEX-$pensive! I hear that a kilobuck is a minimum charge..

CHECK!!!

On a sunny day (Sun, 10 Aug 2014 22:36:21 -0500) it happened Tim Wescott wrote in :

Not by a Linux machine?

Linux had no drive letters, more like /dev/hda /dev/sda whatever

Plug it into a LINUX machine and type in a terminal: dmesg tell me what it shows (cut and paste the last 100 lines or so here), We take it from there.

In case you know that, and find the drive ID, then type in a terminal: fdisk /dev/whatever_you_now_know_it_is

type to list partitions: p type to exit: q

PS DO NOT TYPE ANYTHING ELSE IN fdisk if the clue is not with you so to speak. Cut and past the whole thing on the screen here. We take it from there

In case... OK lets see if you come back at all. :-)

And you did make backups, or somebody did of what is on that drive no? And WTF does anybody these days do with MS machine? MS products are a crime against humanity. You are some terrorist or something?

Not that I could restore your data, but there are programs that can, but just curious what gives.

I have cloned many disks in the past, and recently by simply using 'dd' dd if=/dev/sdy of=/dev/sdz sort of thing, so you HAVE the backup or can play with the backup before screwing up the real thing. of course sdz needs to be same or bigger than sdy, but I have made many copies of live USB sticks that way, also whole Linux systems. If all this is mystery to you buy the person a new drive, donate a new TV apologize, and pray not to be shot. hehe

try dissadembling it and plugging the disk drive directly into a SATA port.

It appears to me that the only way to do that is to successfully get the data off it, and not being able to do so is the problem the OP currently has.

Sylvia.

However, as already suggested, it may be possible to do a raw copy of the d isc using dd or ideally gnu dd_rescue. This will work as long as the hardw are is alive, regardless of whether there is an intact filesystem that the operating system can understand.

Once there are some cloned copies of the drive in its corrupted state, then various tools can be applied to try and restore the filesystem structure o r at least pull off the most important files.

Attempting to recover the filesystem on the original drive rather than a cl one is a very bad idea, as this may make things much worse.

John

The OP said that the drive works. I've asked how he knows. Unless he answers, there's only speculation.

Sylvia.

Windows would not have noticed the EXT format, and probably was in the process of 'helpfull'y reformmating the drive - when she pulled it out.

TestDisk should help.

Do whatever to make sure you don't write anything to the drive before you get your data back off it.

I think you hit the nail on the head here.

Over the next few days, I will try a few of the suggestions made so far. I would be happy just to have a blank $100 HDD back. The data is probably lost by now.

As a last resort, I will pull the case apart and connect the drive directly to an SATA cable.

David King

I've never seen even Windows start formatting a drive without being asked to.

Sylvia.

Do you have a Linux computer which has the physical connection (USB?) to the drive?

Do you have root (or sudo) account on it?

There are plenty of tools for this kind of situation in the Linux world.

Den mandag den 11. august 2014 14.13.22 UTC+2 skrev David King:

I'd do that first, I've had external drives just stop working where there was nothing wrong with the HDD when it was plugged directly in

-Lasse

Format? No, I haven't seen that. But if you take a bootable Window NT 4.0 hard drive and attach it via USB or direct to an IDE port on a machine running Windows 2000 or later, the drive will no longer boot. This happened to me when I was cloning a hard drive for backup purposes on an older Rohde & Schwarz spectrum analyzer. Apparently Windows thinks that it needs to modify the boot sector for some reason...

That used to work (if the problem was a bad USB-SATA adapter), but now, at least on the external 2.5" drives, a lot of them don't have the SATA port connector anymore. The USB to SATA circuitry is on the drive's circuit board. So no more buying external drives, when they're on sale for less than internal drives, and taking out the drive (at least for the 2.5" drive).

Try some of the disk tools on

You could also try Clonezilla and make an image of the drive that you can then put on another drive.

Be aware that on the small external hard disk drives (2.5") that there often will not be a SATA connector. To save money WD put the USB to SATA electronics directly onto the same board as the drive electronics.

See and .

Are you sure that your wife did not get a pop-up of "The disk in drive x is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?" and clicked "Yes."