[SOLVED] Recovering data from a WD two bay external

[OMGMKE]

I am looking for help recovering my data from a Western Digital external hard drive. I removed the drives and installed them in a tower and ran smart tests and bechmarks on them, and they are both fine. The problem I have is getting the partition back or to mount. Linux says unknown partition type, and it is too large. So, there are two 500 GB drives in the enclosure, and when I put them in the desktop, both 500 GB drives show up, but only one has a 1 GB partition, the other is un-alocated space. The drives were used on a Windows 10 machine.

The external enclosure started the rapid blue flashing which lead me to where I am now.
wd10000c033-001

Any help would be greatly appreciated. The drive had ab out 400 gb filled and it was all very important.

Michael

 

[USAFRet]

Were these two drives in some sort of RAID?
Or possibly some sort of encryption?

And not to belabor the point...why is there not a full backup of this "very important" data?

 

[fzabkar]

It appears that the drives were configured as a RAID 0. If so, then DMDE should be able to assemble a virtual RAID and recover your data. It costs US$20. You can recover up to 4000 files from any one folder with the free version.

Alternatively, there is mdadm, a free Linux RAID tool.

 

[OMGMKE]

It was the backup. 🙁
I don't think it was a RAID. The two drives are each 500GB, making a total of 1 TB. I do not know if that is a RAID 0 or not.
I have read that WD encrypts the externals, but I don't think this type. I put no encryption on it.

 

[USAFRet]

It was the backup. 🙁
I don't think it was a RAID. The two drives are each 500GB, making a total of 1 TB. I do not know if that is a RAID 0 or not.
I have read that WD encrypts the externals, but I don't think this type. I put no encryption on it.

If it was "the backup", fix the enclosure and/or drives, and press on.

For that encryption, often, that is not something you do, but rather something it is by default.

 

[fzabkar]

I don't think it was a RAID.

"only one has a 1 GB partition"

This is what you would expect if you were looking at the partition table on the first drive in a 2-drive RAID 0. Otherwise it could be a spanned volume, but then you would be able to recover the files on the first drive.

Can you show us the Partitions windows in DMDE?

I would retrieve a SMART report with a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo or GSmartControl. That should tell us whether either drive has a physical problem.