Old World Book Problems / Get Data Back

Sambo66

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Oct 1, 2010
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18,510
I will make this as brief as possible.

I have an older model WD World Book (White casing w/ Blue Rings) that is a 1 TB capacity. It stopped responding as it had many times over the years . I finally could not get it to respond on my Windows 7 machine. WD support was pretty friendly and after years of owning it , they said it was still under warranty and I could replace it at no extra charge. Except I needed to recover the data on my own. Well I decided to open the housing ( I know , I can't send it to them now) and pull the drive out and hook it up inside my computer to see if I could get it to respond. No luck. The computer would not even see it through Admin tools in Windows. I shelved the problem for a couple months and decided to get back to it the other day.

The Bios saw the drive and Windows as well. It's SATA drive by the way. For whatever reason Windows (in Drive Management tools) sees the one hard drive as 6 small drives. I have no idea why as I had never partitioned the original drive when it was in it's external closure. I ran GET DATA BACK NTFS on the drive and it pulled up all these really small folders with numerical titles. almost 40 of them or so. There is no data in any of these that resembled what I had on the drive. My original drive had 6 Folders: Movies , Pictures , etc. None of what showed up in these small folders even matched my original contents. One folder had "REAL" player I think , which I never used to my recollection. I went back in Windows and shrunk all the partitions down to one partition and re-ran Get Data Back. Same result. Why is the Program not seeing my original content?? I don't see one glimmer of what was originally on there. I've used the program before and I don't mind waiting to find the content. Any suggestions or ideas? I appreciate the input!!
 

John_VanKirk

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Hi there,

Go to Disk Management, and in the lower area, check the Disk Info and Volume Info.

The Disk Info should read Disk 1, Basic, xxx GB, Online. The Volume Info should read "Friendly Name", Assigned letter - D: or E:, NTFS, Healthy (Active).

If there's no letter assigned to it, you won't see it in Windows. Try assigning a different letter to it (not used), or mount it to an empty folder in say Documents, and see if the data appears.
 
If there are issues with the drive, recovery software can only do so much. It looks like the data is scrambled enough that the program can't get all the info it needs construct the files. You had 6 folders, now you have 6 partitions, that's not a coincidence, Windows and the software just can't make out what the drive configuration is and is doing it's best to show it to you in a readable format. The wrong format, but all it can see.

You also did some more damage to the drive by moving around those partitions making the data even more messed up. #1 rule in data recovery is freeze the drive in it's current form, don't install things, don't format it, don't give it to the dog to chew on.

I'm guessing your drive has either partition errors and needs to be reformatted to work again, or it's a physical error and you need a new drive.

Try a different recovery software maybe.
 

Sambo66

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Oct 1, 2010
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18,510
I don't know if I did more damage than before. I only say this because I had Get Data Back rescan the drive with the same results after I shrunk the 6 drives back to one. I'm not saying I know what I'm doing , but the results were the same. I will certainly try more recovery programs tonight and see what I can find. The drive sounds physically fine. No noises. Pretty quiet actually.