WD External Hard drive problems

ehealo

I have a WD External hard drive. It's about 18months old. It has got no abuse, was using it to store movies, music and pictures. But the last time I went to use it, I got a mesage saying my hard drive needed to be formatted. I can't get access to the information saved on it anymore. I didn't format it. I brought it to PC world and they spent about 5 min looking at it and reckoned that the info was still on it, but it needed to be brought to a clean room enviornment to be recovered. This could cost up to 1000 euro I was told.

Anyone with a second opinion out there?

bhickey

ehealo wrote: »

This could cost up to 1000 euro I was told. Anyone with a second opinion out there?

Well if you do actually need to send it to a data recovery company then I don't know where they get €1000 from. Have a look here for more typical pricing for that sort of work.

bonzodog2

I wouldn't beleive much of what PCW say; there are lots of threads here about data recovery programs you can use yourself, some are free, some aren't. I think most free ones need Windows to see a file system, others, e.g. R-studio,Getdataback can work on a raw disk. Don't forget to recover files to a different drive. You did try restarting the pc completely and re-plugging in the drive ? (Seriously ...)

Good luck

ehealo

Yes, tried a restart. No joy!

ehealo

bhickey wrote: »

Well if you do actually need to send it to a data recovery company then I don't know where they get €1000 from. Have a look here for more typical pricing for that sort of work.

Thanks for that B. I have sent an email to the company you liked to me. Hopefully it will get sorted!

ricman

You could open the drive, case ,put it into a caddy ,cost 20 euro, its most likely a sata drive ,so you,ll need a sata caddy.
THE board / pcb, going to the hard drive may be damaged,or loosely connected.
GOOGLE sata drive interface image to confirm its a sata drive.
see here ,http://www.piriform.com/recuva ,i have a pc ,it will not detect any external drives ,it just says device detected , but my laptop can see any drive, try the drive in a friends pc first or plug into a netcafe pc.ie could be a software problem on your pc.

Dey were Sooted

I got a 1TB WD external drive there a few months back - after using it only a few times I managed to damage the small usb socket with a faulty lead that was lying about .

I took the drive out of the case and bought one of these.When I plugged it I got a warning saying that the drive was not formatted.I did a quick format and then a deep scan with Recuva which managed to recover most of the files but not all. About 95% I'm guessing.When the scan was complete I recovered all the files to a drive which I borrowed from a mate.
The deep scan took about 18 hours on a dual core/2GB ram pc so be prepared to have it running for some time.

Thankfully I had the photos on it backed up - over 10,000 in all and whatever else I could not recover was always replaceable.

This may not be good enough for what you are looking for, but maybe it may help someone in a somewhat similar situation.

Good luck with it
Gav

deremol

I had the same problem with a western digital last week, couldn't see any of the files on it, I got a copy of GetDataBack and managed to recover about 90% of the data from the hard drive.

Hope this helps..