External harddrive MIA ????

[Gunney87]

Good Morning all, I have a WD My Passport Ultra 2 tb almost full with important movie files for work. Yesterday I went to copy a video from my drive to desktop and the pc locked up. After a reboot I find that my pc sees my harddrive (i can still safely eject) however if I go to my computer it is not visible. In the past when I have had issues with a file copying usually it is corrupt, so I'm guessing thats what happened, however I still have almost 2 tb's of video I need to get out of that drive. I ran some tests with wd utilities however the tests weren't able to complete. I've also gone to the Computer Management folder to find it there, when I do I see it titled as Disk 1, unknown, not initialized. Really need some direction here. Please help!

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Gunney87,

That is unpleasant. 🙁 It seems that the HDD is failing.
One simple thing you can try is to just attach the drive with a different cable. You can attach it to a different system as well. In case the issue persists and the drive appears the same way under Disk Management, I guess you will need to use some data recovery software.(you can try several I guess)
Check this thread out: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html

Is the drive under warranty?

Let me know how this goes,
D_Know_WD

 

[Gunney87]

Yea I have tried using different cables and tried it on my other pc with no luck. I've also tried to use the programs listed in the link you provided but the problem is the programs cant see the drive so they are useless at the moment. I actually bought minitool for 70 dollars but cant even use it because i get an error message after setup. I'm still waiting to hear from their support regarding that.

 

[D_Know_WD]

As OS based data recovery tools can't pick up the drive, you can try some data recovery tools for DOS mode.(you can google some)
If these can't detect the drive as well, then I doubt that you will be able to access the drive with software tools. 🙁
If the data stored on it is really important, you could consider contacting a data recovery company.

WD's Data Recovery Partners: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=dCYvGZ

D_Know_WD

 

[Gunney87]

I also forgot to mention upon going to disk management i get this message

Will picking any of these options help or will they just erase the drive?

 

[Supermuncher85]

Doing that will erase the drive.

 

[Gunney87]

Doing that will erase the drive.

Thanks

 

[Supermuncher85]

I'd try a linux live cd/usb. I've had way better luck recovering data from linux than I've ever had from within windows. Obviously if linux does see the data, you should consider buying a new external drive and immediately copy any relevant files over to the new drive.

Which linux? Doesn't really matter you can google, there's a few distros which specialize in it, I just use an ubuntu 14.XX that I have flying around my desks.

EDIT: Also if you haven't already read the S.M.A.R.T. data and see what it says there about errors.

There's a whole bunch of other stuff you can try too, but I'm guessing since it asks you to initialize the drive, you've already tried somethings that didn't work. Not sure why for example it's unitialized it shouldn't be. You can always try and a.) update the usb drivers from the device if you see it in device managment (obviously try a different usb port too) b.) try assigning it manually a drive letter by right clicking said harddrive in diskmanagment.