Removed MBL 3TB HDD shows as 0kb in Windows

[Alex Pilon]

Hi all,

Big problem for the past few years, decided to attack it tonight!

Here's the situation: My Book Live 3TB NAS. It fell from a few feet to the ground, right on the Ethernet cable and broke the little SATA/Ethernet adapter in the NAS (power was still working good, but the Ethernet port was broken).

I was able to open-up the casing and remove the hard drive. Thought I'd plug it into my computer's SATA ports: wrong answer. In IDE mode, the BIOS wasn't even seeing the drive.
In RAID mode, the BIOS saw the drive as a 0kb drive, which scared the crap out of me.

After trying and failing, I left it there and came back to it today. Brought from work an HDD docking station (SATA to USB 3.0), plugged the station, and put in the hard drive: Windows recognizes it. I go to Drive management, and I get asked to initialize the drive....which I don't want to do, because I'll lose everything (I have a bit more than 2 TB of music/movies/personnal stuff on it).

Tried booting into Linux: No success, drive doesn't show.
Found a little Windows tool called "Partition find and Mount"....it's the ONLY tool that I found that actually sees the drive...again, at 0kb!

Is there a way to recover the data from this almost dead drive ? I do not care whether it's usable in the future or not, I just want to copy the stuff from it to my other 3 TB non-NAS drive!

Thanks for the help! Oh, and merry Christmas/Hanukkah/whatever

 

[RealBeast]

You can give some of the recovery programs a shot at it -- I would start with Recuva, specifically the free version from HERE.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey Alex. Sorry to hear you are having such issues with your drive. It does sound like the situation's pretty bad. If the drive needs to be initialized, there's a very small chance that a data recovery program will have any luck with recovering your data, but you never know, try @RealBeast's solution. Here's a thread with a couple of more solutions for data recovery which might help: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html
Hopefully you get lucky and recover your data. There's another option, which is a professional solution such as a data recovery company, but that can often be quite expensive. You can take a look at our data recovery partners here: WD Data Recovery Partners

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[fzabkar]

The NAS would probably be using an embedded Linux OS and Linux file systems. If the drive ever appears in Disk Management with its full capacity, then you will need a tool such as Linux Reader for Windows (freeware), Ubuntu Live CD, or UFS Explorer (commercial) to access your files.

That said, if the drive is spinning but not being recognised with its full capacity, then it has probably sustained media damage or head damage, or both. :-(