Help diagnosing drive issue WD10EADS

[stateofreason]

Hello:

I have a 1.0TB SATA drive WD10EADS-11M2B2. All of a sudden the drive became unresponsive in the computer. I could see the basic root folder structures or, in the command line, see the files but cannot really open anything. I hooked it up through a USB enclosure and it behaves the same. the S.M.A.R.T. tools said it was in pre-failure and there was a read error when trying to do the short test. I tried to use TestDrive and the Western Digital tool and both hang trying to read the drive. The drive isn't making any loud or abnormal noises and I can hear it spin up but it does appear to be getting worse.

90% of the files I did get off of another drive and I called one company and they wanted around $1000 to recover the remaining files. They certainly aren't urgent but I'd like to get them if possible. Any steps I can take to resolve this on my own? Might it be the controller board on the drive? Any other software tools I can try? How do these restoration companies get the files off? Thanks!

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there stateofreason,

That is really unpleasant. 🙁
As the drive can't be accessed by software tools, it seems that is it in a really poor state. (most probably, it has many bad sectors on it)

As the data stored on the drive is crucial, I believe your safest bet would be to contact a data recovery company. I believe it will not hurt to check WD's Data Recovery Partners out as well: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=nGZEYk

Apart from that, as the drive can't be accessed by the multiple tools you've tried, I believe you can try using some DOS data recovery tools as well. See if you will manage to access the drive under Ubuntu: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/267999-32-recover-data-mode
You will need to boot (don't install it) from a CD or a flash drive and navigate to the drive.

Keep in mind that accessing a failing drive with different tools, could increase the chance of data loss.

Let me know how this goes,
D_Know_WD