Restore last data on external HDD

jumanji said:

Hi@dsscottage
This post is going to be a long post. So I shall split it and continue.


In all cases where we had restored the Volume Boot Records and TestDisk declared that MFT and MFT mirror are OK, running Check Disk rectified the corrupted file system. Disk access was restored. In your case however that did not happen. Why remains a mystery still. Or was it this? "Users worldwide of Western Digital (WD) hard drives, specifically My Book Live and My Book Live Duo devices, found their hard drives being wiped clean remotely last June 23." This question remains.

I don't have a conclusive answer to that question. My HDD is neither of the two mentioned in the article. The HDD was not connected to a NAS or to a computer. It was connected to a media server (WDTV Live). I suspect that it would be a litle more difficult for a bad actor to access the HDD through the WDTV as opposed to a NAS or HDD connected to the computer. However, I can't rule out anything.

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It will be a while before I post with the results of GetDataBack. After a 24 hour scan, I was examining some of the found files and hit the wrong "X" to close the viewing window and closed the whole program. Therefore, all was lost and I'm starting again.

Interestingly enough, it looks like GetDataBack recovered most but not all of the audio files. I have these files in another location so I don't need them recovered. However, I was impressed that they were recovered with file names intact.

I didn't get to look through all of the recovered data but it didn't look like the larger video files were recovered. Therefore, I'm running the program again on Level 4 to see if I get more recovery.

I'll post my results.

Here are the results of my recovery effort:

Prior to posting, I attempted to recover my files using Wondershare Recoverit. It identified 288,000 files most of which were fragmented and unusable. (There were nowhere near that many files on the HDD prior to the failure.) It listed them with generic files names. This was done prior to using TestDisk to rebuild a defective MFT.

At the recommendation of jumanji, I used GetDataBack to recover files. I was impressed with this program. It was fast. The scanning process took about 5 hours on a 2TB external HDD connected via USB3.

GetBackData recovered about 60% of my files using a Level 4 recovery. I was impressed that it retained all the file names and about 80% were in the correct directory structure.

I’m trying two more alternatives to see if I can recover more files. If either of these is successful, I’ll post back with those results.

I’m surprised that no one posted to admonish me for not having a HDD backup. Thank you for your restraint. Sadly, I’m very much aware of the need for a backup. I have three computers in the house and all are set up with a backup process. The failed HDD was attached to my media server (WDTV Live). I won’t bore you with the details but I rationalized that I didn’t need a backup for this HDD. In the end, it would have been far less time consuming for me to have backed up this HDD too. Lesson learned. I now have a backup.

I want to send a HUGE thank you to jumanji. You spend a great deal of time giving me excellent suggestions and detailed instructions. This saved my bacon and served as a learning experience for me. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU.

jumanji said:

You can try Active@ File Recovery (USD30) Find and Restore Lost Files: Undelete deleted files and recover damaged disks. This and Getdataback (USD 80) are the ones we usually recommend as a last resort. I understand that it more or less works the same way as GDB. Some liked Active @ File Recovery and some GDB.

Once you recover, try to run Hard Disk Sentinel trial version to check the health of your drive Hard Disk Sentinel Trial version - HDD health and temperature monitoring .

I still feel that your HDD is riddled with many bad sectors and the situation may get worse if you keep taxing it repeatedly. ( but I presume you have only audio and video on that drive (and not any important personal data) losing which may not break your heart )

Thank you again. I'll try both. The first of my additional efforts failed and the second is in progress as we write.

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jumanji said:

You can try Active@ File Recovery (USD30) Find and Restore Lost Files: Undelete deleted files and recover damaged disks. This and Getdataback (USD 80) are the ones we usually recommend as a last resort. I understand that it more or less works the same way as GDB. Some liked Active @ File Recovery and some GDB.

Once you recover, try to run Hard Disk Sentinel trial version to check the health of your drive Hard Disk Sentinel Trial version - HDD health and temperature monitoring .

I still feel that your HDD is riddled with many bad sectors and the situation may get worse if you keep taxing it repeatedly. ( but I presume you have only audio and video on that drive (and not any important personal data) losing which may not break your heart )

I've used Hard Disk Sentinal Trial Version. I'm out of my comfort zone here but the program seems to indicate that the HDD is in good condition. Three screen shots are attached. There is a "Disk Repair" function in the program but it is only available after registration. Given that the program seems to indicate that the HDD is "OK", I suspect that this repair isn't necessary.

Is my assumption correct? If so, I'm ready to reformat the HDD and then do a chkdsk.

I can't really say that the problem is "Solved" but, I'll post a brief summary in case anyone else needs to recover data.

I don't know what happened to the HDD to cause a problem but it seems that the Boot Sector became corrupted. TestDisk identified that it was corrupt and apparently replaced it with the Backup Boot Sector but this didn't resolve the issue.

HardDiskSentinal identified that the HDD Performance was 100% and the health was 99% apparently because there were 2 weak sectors. I executed a "Disk Repair" and the test revealed many slow sectors. The chart is attached. The darker green sectors are slow. Some were VERY slow. After the apparent repair, the 2 weak sectors still existed. (chart attached)

All this to say, nothing identified the cause or fixed the problem.

I made 5 attempts to recover files.

Wondershare Recoverit (older version)....
The process was slow. It took a little over 24 hours to scan identify files. There were 288,000 files identified but there were nowhere near that many files on the HDD. All of the files had generic file names and the directory structure was not identified. Most of the files examined were useless (probably fragments)
Conclusion: Useless

Wondershare Recoverit (newest version)....
A friend has the latest version so I tried it. It was EXTREMELY SLOW. The scan took over 3 days and the results were about the same as the older version.
Conclusion: Useless

@FileRecovery
The scan took about 5 hours. It identified many files with generic file names and no directory structure.
Conclusion: Not very good

GetDataBack
The scan took about 5 hours and it identified about 60% of the lost files. All files had the original file names in the correct directory structure.
Conclusion: Very Good

DMDE
The scan took about 5 hours and it identified about 65% of the lost files. All files had the original file names in the correct directory.
Conclusion: Very Good

After all this, I didn't find what caused the problem and wasn't able to fix it. However, I was able to recover almost all my important files.

Once again, A huge THANK YOU to everyone who helped.

thank you