External Hard Drive Error

[Daniel85]

Guy's I really need your help, as of now I'm sooo tired and fed up of trying to resolve my HDD issues for about 14 days straight. I have a barely used WD Passport HDD 1TB external HDD. I plugged it into my PC and it worked fine. I was archiving a folder from the ex HDD to my pc and it got stuck with a "not responding" msg. I waited about 10 mins for it to resolve but it didn't so I pulled the HDD usb from the pc without doing the "safely remove" process and stuck it back in. It's showing up on the "my computer" window as drive (h) but when I click it it says "the drive is inaccessible" and that I "need to format". I went into disk management after about 30 mins it shows up as "healthy primary partition" (raw file system) and 100% free space. I tried chkdsk from cmd and ran it for over 15hrs and not even 1% was completed so I canceled it thinking it was a lost cause. I tried going into the properties of the drive from the disk management window, "tools" "error disk check" that also says " windows cant access the disk". I tried "recuva" running it for about 2 days then canceled it thinking it was a lost cause but this time some of my files showed up, I tried to recover some of the files that showed from the scan but after 1 day of "recovering" it showed the estimated remaining time to recover would take 23 days!!! so again I canceled it. I'm currently running a scan with EaseUS data recovery for 7 days straight now and only 1% completed, I'm hoping that this will work but if it takes nearly the amount of time to recover the files like Recuva then I don't think it will work, the drive maybe burnt out by then. I'm also trying multiple partition recovery software but there always seems to be some sort of error. I'm just tired and disheartened, pease help!

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, Daniel.

I'm really sorry to hear about the issues you've been experiencing with your HDD.
When the current scanning process with the data recovery software is completed, or if you decide to cancel it as well, I'd recommend that you try the drive with a different computer and a different USB cable to see if the same thing happens.
Besides data recovery software, if you haven't messed around with the partition at all, you could give it a try with Ubuntu Live USB/DVD, to see if the HDD is properly recognized and if you can access it so that you can get to your files.
Unfortunately, if neither Ubuntu nor data recovery software can do the trick, perhaps your best bet would be a professional solution: WD Data Recovery Partners.

Hope that helps. Please keep me posted.
Boogieman_WD

 

[Daniel85]

Hey there, Daniel.

I'm really sorry to hear about the issues you've been experiencing with your HDD.
When the current scanning process with the data recovery software is completed, or if you decide to cancel it as well, I'd recommend that you try the drive with a different computer and a different USB cable to see if the same thing happens.
Besides data recovery software, if you haven't messed around with the partition at all, you could give it a try with Ubuntu Live USB/DVD, to see if the HDD is properly recognized and if you can access it so that you can get to your files.
Unfortunately, if neither Ubuntu nor data recovery software can do the trick, perhaps your best bet would be a professional solution: WD Data Recovery Partners.

Hope that helps. Please keep me posted.
Boogieman_WD

Boogieman,
Thank you for taking the time to respond, I did try the drive on another Win7 OS PC but that didn't work either, however I did not use a new cable. As for Ubuntu i'm not a very tech savvy person and don't know the first thing about Ubuntu but i'm good at trying and figuring it out along the way but I'll need some basic help on where to start just to get things going. How do I use Ubuntu to get my files?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Well, what I had in mind is to simply try the drive with that OS and see if it's properly recognized so that you can open it (basically the same thing, as if you were using Windows, but give it a try with a different OS).
Here's how to make a bootable USB flash drive: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows. The tutorial has a link, which you can use to download Ubuntu.

 

[Daniel85]

Well, what I had in mind is to simply try the drive with that OS and see if it's properly recognized so that you can open it (basically the same thing, as if you were using Windows, but give it a try with a different OS).
Here's how to make a bootable USB flash drive: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows. The tutorial has a link, which you can use to download Ubuntu.

Yeah boogie, I did that on Ubuntu already, it said that the MBR or MFT or something like is bad and that I should use chkdsk on windows to try and repair it. I'm just tired of this entire situation, Every scan or software I used takes days to complete. I watched a few vids on youtube with those who have similar issues and they said it usually takes a few hours (8 -16hrs for my 1TB HDD). When I do my scans they take 4-7 days. My last resort is to format the drive and restore it to factory condition and use a data recovery software hoping with the "fixed" drive the scan and data recovery will take the regulars 8-16 hrs as others have done. Any last suggestion or advice?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

I'm afraid that if it's not a files system error and if the drive is having issues, reformatting it might make it worse and you could lose your data. If you decide to go with that option, go with quick format (not full), but in my opinion this is a mistake. The drive seems to having issues and the best course of action for data recovery would be a data recovery company. However, I understand that this is not the most budget friendly option (to say the least) so it's up to you to decide how you want to proceed.