WD My Book dropped -- Windows sees the device but as uninitialzed

MaloK said:

What happens if you try to run a non-destructive surface test ?

I can't even do that because the drive has no volume or drive letter...

I was able to get a hold of MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro version 10.2 (borrowed). It seems whatever enhancements they'd made were after this one. I'm running it now and it's pretty much as slow as the version 9.1 that I tried. There's 15.6 billion sectors on this drive and it's scanning like 10 million sectors every 5 minutes. That's like 2.88 billion sectors per day. Which means it'll need to run for about 5 days straight! Which is just preposterous... Unless the scan speeds up later in the process or doesn't need to hit all sectors of the drive.

So I figured why not provide a shorter LBA range? I let it run for 15 million LBA, full scan. This ran much faster. When it was done the checkbox was enabled in the single partition line item. I clicked it. Clicked "Finish". And nothing happened.


- - - Updated - - -

I installed Paragon Partition Manager, which has a surface test feature. I'm running that now.
What's curious is that it shows 2 partitions... One being 2TB and the other 5.4TB. It looks like it's detecting the data and where it ends, deciding that this is a separate partition. The owner of the drive says there's about 2TB of files on it.



Well, this did not go well. At the start of the surface test, Paragon status message is "preparing for test." "still preparing, please give us more time." "still preparing, we're about to start any second." And a bunch of other humorously worded status messages like "still preparing, please don't lose hope." 15 minutes later, and it's still "preparing" to start the test. So I abandoned it.

jumanji said:

Hi @cytherian,
I just switched on my PC and saw the notification by steve108 pulling me into this. ...........

If you'd rather not be pulled in for similar future requests by me, please PM me You seem to have created a reputation for yourself on the topic of data recovery.

Pull me into - Idioms by The Free Dictionary I don't want to drag someone into something they don't want to be involved with.

Hi @cytherian,

Referring to the Partition Recovery Wizard screenshot in your post#22, when one selects the right partitions shown as Lost/deleted, the preview map at the bottom of that window should show the drive as it existed before. If it doesn't it means that the selected partition/s is/are not correct.

Also if it were the correct partition, double clicking on the selected partition in the list should show all the files.

Only if these conditions are met, you are supposed to click on Finish and then Apply to restore the partitions.

Now what you can try:

1. Do a sector to sector cloning of the faulty drive. ( Requires another 8TB drive and a cloning software or a dock which can do cloning. I think @MaloK whom I consider as a competent and motivated data recovery professional can help you doing it. I am only an arm-chair consultant who doesn't do any data recovery in real life )

2. Once sucessfully cloned, carefully remove faulty HDD from the enclosure and fit in the cloned drive which now has the encrypted data in it ( if at all it is there)

3. Try data recovery on the cloned drive.

Not sure whether it will be successful , but this is the only option available to try as a last resort.

Note: I zeroed my Seagate 5TB external and this is how it looks like in Partition Recovery Wizard



I am not surprised to see it as an MBR drive even though it was a GPT drive ExFat formatted with partition start sector at sector 2048. Since I had wiped it and zeroed it it is not going to find any partition at 2048. Even sector 0 has all zeroes in it but still it shows as an MBR drive. If I invoke Windows Disk Management, it will ask me to initialise it as a GPT drive.

"I installed Paragon Partition Manager, which has a surface test feature. I'm running that now.
What's curious is that it shows 2 partitions... One being 2TB and the other 5.4TB. It looks like it's detecting the data and where it ends, deciding that this is a separate partition. The owner of the drive says there's about 2TB of files on it."

Nay. A drive initialised as an MBR drive and formatted, can access only the first 2TB. That is the limitation of MBR. If you initialise a larger than 2TB drive as an MBR drive it will format only 2TB and the rest of the space will remaim unallocated. All or most partitioning software assume that you are dealing with a low capacity MBR drive. The 2TB shown by Paragon Partition Manager has no relevance to the data in it.

See how the Paragon Partition Manager sees my 5TB Seagate external, It does not have even 1bit or byte of data in it.



On a side note, did you try running the surface test with Partition Wizard?

steve108 said:

If you'd rather not be pulled in for similar future requests by me, please PM me You seem to have created a reputation for yourself on the topic of data recovery.

Pull me into - Idioms by The Free Dictionary I don't want to drag someone into something they don't want to be involved with.

The Free Dictionary idiom does not work in my case ( as most of my rantings do or do not). More often than not I do not look into other subforums and so a "push" notification is required to "pull in" but a day when I voluntarily retire is not far off.

Thanks for the screenshot. It appears that the disk does not have an MSR partition ( which is not required for an external drive or even an internal data drive. ( But if you format the drive with Windows Disk Management it will always create an MSR partition)