Failed External Mybook 1.5tb - Attempted to make it Internal ..

[aez76]

ok so I've basically done the same this this guy has done

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/293647-32-hard-drive-recovery-partition-size-shown-there

...
My external failed, I figured sure, pop it inside the computer and we're good to go.. Wrong - I've tried to follow along the thread and I can't figure it out :|

The original enclosure seemed to be in error, the drive would start to spin then fail indicating no power .. often seen with passports and too long of a cord.. however the mybook has it's own power supply so I didn't understand why it wasn't getting power.

I have a 1.5TB WD HD (WD15EADS) which was inside the mybook.
much like the thread from the previous guy, I put it in the computer and it came up in disk manager where I foolishly initialized .. I attempted to avoid formatting however after a couple scans with a few programs and not getting an results I thought ok, I've recovered from a reformat before .. shouldn't be an issue might make it easier for the program to scan... nope, wrong..

now that being said, after reading that thread, I realized I had a WD Mybook enclosure from another defunct hdd that was physically damaged .. so using that I plugged the hdd in and it fires up with no problems..

However I have no idea how to repair the boot sector, nothing else has been written to this hdd. I ran TestDrive and the boot sector doesn't say anything's out of sync, but it does say the MFT and MFT mirror are bad.

Any ideas on how to proceed are appreciated .. wasn't sure where to start, but here's a screenshot O' Fun

 

[aez76]

Further to, I've run another scan and It can find the first partition now, however that is the WD system partition, I can't figure out how to find the one with the data on it. Thanks again for any help.

 

[fzabkar]

My Book Essentials enclosures are encrypted, while My Book Elements are not. Which do you have?

 

[aez76]

Thanks for the response, I have the WDBAAF0015HBK which appears to be the Essentials version.

 

[fzabkar]

Essentials models are encrypted, so Windows would have seen the data as gibberish. That's why you were invited to initialise the drive. When you accepted the invitation, Windows would have rewritten sector 0. That would have been relatively easy to undo. However, a format is much more serious.

You now need to reinstall the drive in its original enclosure, clone it to another drive, and then run data recovery software against the clone. If your replacement enclosure is an Elements, then it will be unencrypted and therefore of no use to you.

 

[aez76]

Ok, it's going to take me a bit to make room on a hard drive big enough to do this.. what cloning software do you recommend and can it clone to a network hard drive?

 

[fzabkar]

If you clone to a NAS, then you will be creating an image file on the destination drive. It won't be a HDD-to-HDD copy. That's OK, though. Most (all?) data recovery software should be able to work with an image, at least on a local drive. I don't know how such software will handle an image file on a NAS, though.