Recovering a failed External drive without a backup

Thread needs solution
truwrikodrorowrelupicugojestutroclulachosaswunuhospikigawakijosaswenomaruclojeueclikaspedrubewidebrisubrohutrurifruuagothunugekedrumucisiuobrobrecrupeslapuswosluprothethibakaslechurathikucli
Beginner
Posts: 1
Comments: 0

Sorry if this has been asked before.

I have a 500gb WD My Book External drive that has failed.  Windows will not acknowledge it at all.  I've removed it from its case and hooked it up via a USB cable.

I've been able to access the drive somewhat using a Windows PE boot CD, but I can't detect any file system.  I think I want to backup the existing partition and attempt to recover the files from the backup.  Most of the files are backups of my Music CD collection in FLAC format.

Which product to I want to use and how difficult will this be to accomplish?  I'm not at all sure whether there are bad areas on the drive.  I think it was the power supply on the external case that caused the drive to fail, since for a while it was bouncing in and out of Windows Explorer.

Sat, 08/29/2009 - 15:00
0 Users found this helpful
truwrikodrorowrelupicugojestutroclulachosaswunuhospikigawakijosaswenomaruclojeueclikaspedrubewidebrisubrohutrurifruuagothunugekedrumucisiuobrobrecrupeslapuswosluprothethibakaslechurathikucli
Forum Member
Posts: 14
Comments: 50

If you can't "detect any file system," you have a totally corrupt drive with no formatting, and no "format" code in the first track of the drive.

If you know how the boot record and format type codes are stored on NTFS (or FAT32), you might be able to use Disk Director (although I prefer Paragon Partition Manager) to find bytes that got corrupted and manually edit those bytes to revive the drive.

Until you can read the drive, TrueImage or Backup/Restore are useless to you.  They expect to read working drive the Operating System can "see."

If the data is critical to you, you might want to contact a "Data Recovery" expert in your vicinity.  They do this kind of emergency data reconstruction, but they're expensive.

As a personal preference, I avoid Western Digital drives like the plague; I've never seen very many that didn't fail prematurely.  My experience with Seagate (over 30 years) has never disappointed.

Sat, 08/29/2009 - 20:13