Unreadable 3 TB WD Caviar Green Internal HDD
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C0RR0SIVE
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That is because it sees damaged areas as its scanning, and is doing a very deep scan at a slower rate so it hopefully doesn't miss anything... It took 3 days to scan an old slow 160GB drive I had at one time, a faster 3TB would take a long time as well. Make sure your PC doesn't go to sleep or anything, and make sure you have a second drive in your PC to recover the data to if you can in fact pull data.
WD tech support is ready to throw in the towel. I mean, they have been telling me all along to go see one of their business partners, to see what they can do for me, but this time, they actually suggested that maybe I should get an RMA.
"If the hard drive or data is no longer accessible, and all trouble-shooting solutions have been exhausted, it is unlikely that data can be recovered without a professional data recovery service.
"I apologize for the inconvenience, Western Digital does not have any in-house data recovery service, nor do we cover the costs to have the data recovered from your drive. We recommend using one of our data recovery partners.
"Answer Title: How to recover data on a drive, obtain a circuit board, repair a drive, or find a list of WD data recovery partners
Answer Link: How to recover data on a drive, obtain a circuit board, repair a drive, or find a list of WD data recovery partners
"Answer Title: How to get an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) or replace a defective product under warranty"
Answer Link: How to get an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) or replace a defective product under warranty
I haven't told them, yet, that MagicCute Data Recovery is able to view the files on my drive. They don't have the original names, but the contents appear to be intact. So far, MagicCute has found 105k files, and it estimates it has more than 12 hours to go.
I also found another program that is able to view my 3 TB drive, called MiniTool Power Data Recovery 6.6. It says it is a free download (don't they all?), but after installation, it tells what its service fees are. The first GB of recovered files is free; after that, you have to pay $59. MagicCute costs about $49.90 for a 2 year license.
"If the hard drive or data is no longer accessible, and all trouble-shooting solutions have been exhausted, it is unlikely that data can be recovered without a professional data recovery service.
"I apologize for the inconvenience, Western Digital does not have any in-house data recovery service, nor do we cover the costs to have the data recovered from your drive. We recommend using one of our data recovery partners.
"Answer Title: How to recover data on a drive, obtain a circuit board, repair a drive, or find a list of WD data recovery partners
Answer Link: How to recover data on a drive, obtain a circuit board, repair a drive, or find a list of WD data recovery partners
"Answer Title: How to get an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) or replace a defective product under warranty"
Answer Link: How to get an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) or replace a defective product under warranty
I haven't told them, yet, that MagicCute Data Recovery is able to view the files on my drive. They don't have the original names, but the contents appear to be intact. So far, MagicCute has found 105k files, and it estimates it has more than 12 hours to go.
I also found another program that is able to view my 3 TB drive, called MiniTool Power Data Recovery 6.6. It says it is a free download (don't they all?), but after installation, it tells what its service fees are. The first GB of recovered files is free; after that, you have to pay $59. MagicCute costs about $49.90 for a 2 year license.
C0RR0SIVE
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There are two types of data recovery really....
Data Recovery for physically damaged drives
Data Recovery for drives that suffered some form of a logical damage, or lost the partition tables.
The first form requires special clean rooms and machinery to recover the data as the drive must be opened. The second one, usually software can recover the data. Honestly, once you recover your data from that drive to ANOTHER drive you have, send th 3TB in as an RMA so they can fix the issue that caused your drive to loose the partition table.
All that happened was the partition table just disappearing. Using software since you haven't formatted or wrote data to it should work fine, then you can RMA it and let them fix it, then you can start using the drive and put your data from the spare back to it if you wish.
Hopefully this teaches you that you should always have a backup solution that can handle all your data.
Data Recovery for physically damaged drives
Data Recovery for drives that suffered some form of a logical damage, or lost the partition tables.
The first form requires special clean rooms and machinery to recover the data as the drive must be opened. The second one, usually software can recover the data. Honestly, once you recover your data from that drive to ANOTHER drive you have, send th 3TB in as an RMA so they can fix the issue that caused your drive to loose the partition table.
All that happened was the partition table just disappearing. Using software since you haven't formatted or wrote data to it should work fine, then you can RMA it and let them fix it, then you can start using the drive and put your data from the spare back to it if you wish.
Hopefully this teaches you that you should always have a backup solution that can handle all your data.
That's good advice.
It's difficult to keep 7 TB of data backed up, especially on tight funds. I think I've lost only about 200 GB, though. Of course, some files that I very much want to keep just happen to be in some of the most recent file uploads. I attended a special event 2 weeks ago, and shot photos and video of it.
It's difficult to keep 7 TB of data backed up, especially on tight funds. I think I've lost only about 200 GB, though. Of course, some files that I very much want to keep just happen to be in some of the most recent file uploads. I attended a special event 2 weeks ago, and shot photos and video of it.
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If they are precious enough, and the software can see the data is there, buy it. Worth a shot ya ask me.
I understand it's hard to backup large amounts of data, I am in the same pickle with my multimedia server, have around 4TB worth of media, but to back it up and have some form of redundancy I would need another 12TB in 2TB disks for a large RAID5 array. No way to back up properly on the cheap when it comes to mass data.
I understand it's hard to backup large amounts of data, I am in the same pickle with my multimedia server, have around 4TB worth of media, but to back it up and have some form of redundancy I would need another 12TB in 2TB disks for a large RAID5 array. No way to back up properly on the cheap when it comes to mass data.
I went so far as to take a class in Information Storage and Management, in hopes of learning how to handle large amounts of data. I saw some things that give me ideas. I think the most applicable idea I saw for the home user is software that can connect a bunch of disparate drives into a single storage glob, from which drives may be added or removed at random. It is better than a RAID array, in that it uses space more efficiently and can withstand multiple simultaneous failures. I don't remember all the vendors that will be or are producing versions of it, but it is coming out in the next generation of server software.
In hunting around the Web, I'm noticing a few other people reporting the same problem at about the same time. This could be just a coincidence; WD hard drives supposedly have a high failure rate, lately. But, 2 other common oddities take place, too:
1) The hard drives are almost full when they fail. Someone suggested to one victim that his drive wrote past the 2.2 TB boundary and the SATA controller wrapped around.
2) Leap second was June 30/July 1, and several computer systems around the world crashed when they did not handle it correctly.
I cannot find a good correlation between the drive failure and the leap second; these failures take place before the leap second does. It just seems odd that so many would happen in the middle or end of June.
Other problems that cropped on my computer about the same time:
3) I also can no longer play Flash in Firefox.
4) Microsoft Word 2003 often stops responding for a few minutes, beginning immediately after the program loads.
I am looking for any information that might relate to this issue.
I believe the reason that some file recovery software could access my 3 TB HDD, but others could not, is that a lot of file recovery software cannot access GPT partitions (they are stuck in the MBR world).
1) The hard drives are almost full when they fail. Someone suggested to one victim that his drive wrote past the 2.2 TB boundary and the SATA controller wrapped around.
2) Leap second was June 30/July 1, and several computer systems around the world crashed when they did not handle it correctly.
I cannot find a good correlation between the drive failure and the leap second; these failures take place before the leap second does. It just seems odd that so many would happen in the middle or end of June.
Other problems that cropped on my computer about the same time:
3) I also can no longer play Flash in Firefox.
4) Microsoft Word 2003 often stops responding for a few minutes, beginning immediately after the program loads.
I am looking for any information that might relate to this issue.
I believe the reason that some file recovery software could access my 3 TB HDD, but others could not, is that a lot of file recovery software cannot access GPT partitions (they are stuck in the MBR world).
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