Data recovery

[schmenbj]

Hey there,

Firstly thanks for reading. I have some portable and external hard drives that i wish to get data off. The problem is that they power up but don't load on my laptop. I am running windows 10 on my ASUS K501. My portable hard drives are western digital 2.0 TB WD20NMVW and my external hard drives are western digital 2.0 TB WD20EARX SATA. The drives power up, some spin and some click. The power light comes on all off them but they don't appear in My computer or device manager. I was wondering if there was anyway I could directly plug them in to my laptop to access them, or any other way that I can get the data off. Any help would be appreciated. I have attached some photos of the hard drives and connections. Can you please let me know what equipment or cables I would need and/or recovery software.

Thanks again.

-Brendan

 

[carnageX]

Middle picture is standard SATA. Top drive looks to be SATA underneath the enclosure controller card; I'm assuming the same thing for the bottom one.

Since you're running a laptop...that's a different issue as you won't have the proper connection length to actually plug the drives in... not sure if they make an adapter where you can plug directly into one of the SATA ports (if you have any spare, that is) of your laptop or not. Otherwise, you may have to either try them in their docks / with their enclosure controllers, or find a desktop computer to borrow.

Either way, you may need to just try booting into Linux off of a LiveCD or LiveUSB (off of a distro such as Ubuntu). I've had much better luck in trying to recover data off of dying drives in Linux than in Windows; even through an external device. It took several tries to copy all of the data off...but in the end I retrieved 90% of it.

 

[JaredP]

OK, just a few things here you should know. Many My Book externals (all newer ones actually) encrypt the data via the USB bridge board, so if you remove it and try to directly SATA connect the drive you'll only get encrypted data back. This is regardless of whether or not you set a password, the drive is encrypted using a randomized disk encryption key so that if you later set a password it's already encrypted. So you have to work via the USB bridge unless you've got equipment such as PC-3000 which can simulate WD encryption.

My Passport / Elements drives (the bottom picture) only have a USB port and a few terminal ports on the PCB. There is no SATA connection there, thus no adapter exists. It is possible to solder in a SATA port if you know how to trace the circuitry, but if you do so you'll be bypassing he USB bridge chip which is also used to encrypt/decrypt the data. So, once again, you'd only be reading useless encrypted data.

Any drive that is clicking, has an internal failure (most likely read/write heads) and will require professional recovery by a company with a clean room.

These really aren't the type of drives you want to be attempting DIY recovery if the data is important. Most likely you'll only complicate the recovery and run up the cost of what it'll later require from a professional lab.