WD Drive broken

vivant

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Apr 19, 2014
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Hello!

I have an internal WD Green 3 TB that has recently been dropped on the floor.

It has worked for a couple of days but today finally it stopped working.
However, I didn't get the chance to get any of the data from it.
Now it doesn't make any strange sounds, just sounds like its working, but it doesn't appear on the computer as present. Just before it stopped I looked in it tried to enter a folder and it said "Device not ready" or something.

Is there any hope ?
 
Solution


It's quite likely that they will be able to get more data if they change the heads. Though I expect the quoted price is much higher than what they charged to get back the first amount of data.

The drop likely damaged/killed the heads, and since data is striped across...

vivant

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Apr 19, 2014
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18,510


What do you have in mind ?
Can I recover my data if I try to boot on that device ?
 

JaredDM

Honorable
#1 Check to see if the drive is appearing in BIOS/UEFI & shows correct capacity (if not, will need pro recovery)
#2 If it appears normal in BIOS/UEFI try to clone it using ddrescue in Linux

Here's a data recovery flow chart that might help:
Data-Recovery-Procedure.png
 

vivant

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Apr 19, 2014
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18,510
All right. I took the drive to a professional recovery service and they recovered 1 TB out of 2.72 TB.
They said that they can recover the rest if they open up the drive and change two of the heads. I don't really think that they can recover more even if they do open the drive.
! My drive is still in warranty and I can get a new one. I think I should just forget about the rest of the data and get a new drive though the warranty service.
What do you think ?
 

JaredDM

Honorable


It's quite likely that they will be able to get more data if they change the heads. Though I expect the quoted price is much higher than what they charged to get back the first amount of data.

The drop likely damaged/killed the heads, and since data is striped across platters like a RAID 0 array all files larger than a few MB will be lost (without replacing those heads) because the files are stored across all the platter surfaces. It happens all the time.

 
Solution