External HDD recovery

Hi,

My first post on the new forum yay! Hope you've been well. I kinda need your help with something: I have an external WD hard disk (MBR, with one NTFS partition) which stopped being recognised by Windows or OS X (is this the right category?).

Basically, I can't view the contents of the drive and it just keeps spinning and making a periodic noise. It shows 100% activity in Window's task manager, even though I am not able to access it. On Mac, it says that the drive needs to be initialised.

I've tried the following:
- Running chkdsk with the /b flag. It was slow and after a while it started reporting missing file records
- Cloning it with dd. I was able to read (something, about 4 MB), but it started becoming very slow, 2-3 KB/s slow, continuing the weird noises, so I cancelled.

Any idea what else I can try? Could it be a broken controller and the disk itself is fine?

Best regards,

Stefan

Testdisk is quite effecient at recovering data, and partitions, you may want to take the drive out of the case and attach it to a proper internal SATA controller first though, it may simply be the usb bridge powering the drive which is acting up.

4 Likes

+1 for testdisk

Testdisk also works on raw images.

Thanks very much guys, I'll check that out when I get home.

USB can be flaky for hard drives. A good SATA connection is much better. +1 on taking the drive out of the enclosure. If nothing else, you are eliminating a few potential points of failure.

Also, if you HDD is in the process of a head crash, which it sounds like it may be, time is of the essence. You need to recover as much data as possible before the platters are wrecked.

Unfortunately the drive doesn't have a SATA connection, only micro USB 3.0 B, which is soldered to the logic board.. TestDisk wasn't able to do much either, I tried to get an image of the drive, but after about 10 minutes it copied 3 MB. I think it'd be long gone before it manages to copy even 1 GB of data, presuming the data is even usable.

Anyway, I'll try and get in touch with a data recovery specialist, as last resort. Any recommendations for someone in the London area?

If this data is absolutely mission critical to you, then go to a professional. Expect to pay a hefty price for mechanical data recovery.

Any recovery effort you make now may cause more data loss.

For a WD drive:

And, you know: backups!

1 Like

Yep, I'll stop trying to fix things on my own. I wouldn't call it mission critical, but would still like to recover it. What can the price ranges be like?

Pricing is usually on a per-case basis.

I found two places in the UK with price indications:

Datawreck
Data Recovery London

Thanks mate, I'll see what I can do.

Use dd-rescue to make the image rather than dd, it works better for dodgy disks as it skips bad blocks then comes back to them once it has imaged all the good ones.

I'm not going to do anything else for now. The head seems to be having trouble reading anything, regardless of software used. Thanks for the tip though.

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