WD Hard Drive My Book Essential 3 TB Problem

[HollowLord]

Hi,
I currently using WD Hard Drive My Book Essential 3 TB USB 3.0 to backup my data from my computer ( Windows Vista, and Windows 8 ) . But few days ago I can't open the EHD. Usually after i plugged the USB to my computer it would run the WD Smartware or whatever it is (i forgot) to unlock (encrypt) the WD My Book Essential.

I open my "Computer" and find that there a external Hard Disk (Local Disk E: ) available and after i click the Disk E: it says that i need to format my disk (Disk E: ) before I can use it.

Some information that i currently know:
- It shows in "Computer" as Local Disk E:
- It shows in Computer Management / Disk Management :
- Volume (E: )
- Layout : Simple
- Type : Basic
- File System : RAW
- Status : Healthy (Primary Partition)
- Capacity 2794 GB with 2794 free.

I had read some other forum and found some cases that might be similar to mine but i haven't try anything yet. Some says that there "lost partition" and i need to use partition recovery software.I don' want to format it neither disassemble it. I had lots of important data there and i need this to backup by current data since I'm running out of space in my computer. I'm really grateful if someone can quickly come with solution for this. Thank You.

 

[fzabkar]

Can you access sector 0 with a disc editor, eg DMDE (freeware)?

 

[HollowLord]

I run the program and open my drive (Physical Drive 1), and then there a partition window appear in front of the DMDE main window with "Sectors - 0" written in the upper corner.

This is what appear in the Partition Window :

Volume_____________Partition_____F.system____Size______Indicators___First Sector_Last Sector
- Physical drive 1 _________________MBR[4K]_____3.00 TB___T (green)_____ 0_______732 558 335
> x ( a red x mark )___Primary______ MSData (07)_3.00 TB___Ex (a red x)____256_____732 558 335

I click on the "x" mark and the main window (sector - 0 window ) showing "00 00 00"s and ". . ." .

 

[fzabkar]

The fact that you can see sector 0 means that the drive is not totally dead. The partition table is telling us that there is a single 3TB NTFS (type 07) volume beginning at sector 256. The partition format is MBR, and the sector size is 4KB.

Windows sees your volume as "raw" because there is some corruption in a critical area of the file system. If the damage is not too severe, you can sometimes use a Ubuntu Live CD to mount the file system. Otherwise you would need data recovery software. If possible, clone your drive, sector by sector, and then run data recovery software against the clone.

That said, I would first examine sector 256. It should be an NTFS boot sector.

To this end, launch DMDE, uncheck the Show Partitions box, select your Physical Drive, and OK.

Then select Editor -> Goto Offset -> sector 256 -> OK.

If you select Mode -> Hexadecimal, you should an "NTFS" signature near the beginning of the sector.

You might also like to examine the drive's SMART report using HD Sentinel or CrystalDiskInfo. Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.

 

[HollowLord]

The fact that you can see sector 0 means that the drive is not totally dead. The partition table is telling us that there is a single 3TB NTFS (type 07) volume beginning at sector 256. The partition format is MBR, and the sector size is 4KB.

Windows sees your volume as "raw" because there is some corruption in a critical area of the file system. If the damage is not too severe, you can sometimes use a Ubuntu Live CD to mount the file system. Otherwise you would need data recovery software. If possible, clone your drive, sector by sector, and then run data recovery software against the clone.

That said, I would first examine sector 256. It should be an NTFS boot sector.

To this end, launch DMDE, uncheck the Show Partitions box, select your Physical Drive, and OK.

Then select Editor -> Goto Offset -> sector 256 -> OK.

If you select Mode -> Hexadecimal, you should an "NTFS" signature near the beginning of the sector.

You might also like to examine the drive's SMART report using HD Sentinel or CrystalDiskInfo. Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.

I'm not sure where is the "NTFS" , is it NTFS Search ?

This what appear after i choose sector 256 on the "Goto Offset"

Sectors 0 - 732 558 335
_______________________________________________
LBA : 256________________block 256
00000100000 : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
00000100010 : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
00000100020 : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
00000100030 : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
and so on ...

I try to run the NTFS Search is this okay?

 

[fzabkar]

The boot sector is obviously blank. I would now try to reconstruct it from a backup copy. There should be one near the end of the drive.

Type Ctrl-End to go to the last sector of the drive. Then select Tools -> Search for Special Sector -> NTFS boot sector. Search in the Backward direction.

If you don't find the backup boot sector within 1 minute, then abort the search. Go to the first sector (Ctrl-Home) and search in the Forward direction. As before, if you don't find the backup boot sector within 1 minute, then abort the search.

 

[HollowLord]

The boot sector is obviously blank. I would now try to reconstruct it from a backup copy. There should be one near the end of the drive.

Type Ctrl-End to go to the last sector of the drive. Then select Tools -> Search for Special Sector -> NTFS boot sector. Search in the Backward direction.

If you don't find the backup boot sector within 1 minute, then abort the search. Go to the first sector (Ctrl-Home) and search in the Forward direction. As before, if you don't find the backup boot sector within 1 minute, then abort the search.

It's not working. I scanned it few times and it did not find anything. What should i do?

 

[fzabkar]

Go to sector 0 and drag the vertical scrollbar downwards. Do you see anything other than zeros?

 

[HollowLord]

Go to sector 0 and drag the vertical scrollbar downwards. Do you see anything other than zeros?

No, neither in the top most or the bottom most. it only show zeros, but somewhere in the middle there some strange symbol that repeated few times.

 

[fzabkar]

If you scroll from sector 0 to the last sector on the drive and see nothing but zeros, then that's suggesting that the drive has been wiped clear. I'm assuming that DMDE doesn't report any read errors while doing this.

I can't imagine what you are seeing in the middle of the drive, unless it's a repeating pattern of 16 bytes. If so, then they could be encrypted zeros.

 

[MusicmanSA]

The fact that you can see sector 0 means that the drive is not totally dead. The partition table is telling us that there is a single 3TB NTFS (type 07) volume beginning at sector 256. The partition format is MBR, and the sector size is 4KB.

Windows sees your volume as "raw" because there is some corruption in a critical area of the file system. If the damage is not too severe, you can sometimes use a Ubuntu Live CD to mount the file system. Otherwise you would need data recovery software. If possible, clone your drive, sector by sector, and then run data recovery software against the clone.

That said, I would first examine sector 256. It should be an NTFS boot sector.

To this end, launch DMDE, uncheck the Show Partitions box, select your Physical Drive, and OK.

Then select Editor -> Goto Offset -> sector 256 -> OK.

If you select Mode -> Hexadecimal, you should an "NTFS" signature near the beginning of the sector.

You might also like to examine the drive's SMART report using HD Sentinel or CrystalDiskInfo. Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.

Good day fzabkar.

I hope you can assist me with a similar problem. I searched for days and found a few of your posts and I think you are the only one that seems to know what they are doing. This is my 1st ever post for help so pls excuse if I should've started a new thread.

Problem:: Power outage while data was being written to a WD 3 TB, I suspect the job was done since it was a small file but I'm not sure . After restart I received a message to format drive. Drive shows up as basic, raw & healthy 2794.52 GB. Laptop Windows 7 64bit. I encountered this exact problem before and knew I should not fiddle as you pointed out in another thread.
I unplugged the external and connected it to another laptop running W7 (32-bit). Since I used it on both PC's I figured maybe it will work and hoped it was an OS problem. Still same issue.

I suspect something is corrupt and have the same issue as this thread so I downloaded DMDE to inspect but to be honest I don't know what to look for or do. I just figured I'll follow every post of yours till I can find a solution but I'm stuck. So far I haven't done anything to the drive. Tried to follow your instruction above. DMDE displays 2 physical drives, 1st for the one in laptop (Physical Drive 0) and the 3TB shows up as 802GB (Physical Drive 1).
When I double click on it I receive this message: Partitions occupy up to 5860532224 LBA (#TB). Current disk size 1565565872 LBA (802GB) There might be partitioning errors, driver errors, 2 TiB/LBA 48 not supported, ect...
After I click OK I get this summary:
Volume Part. FSystem Size Ind. Start LBA End LBA
Physical Drive 1 [802 GB] GPT 802 GB [ !T ] LBA: 0 - 1565565871
599C43AF-8298....... GPT (EE) 802 GB [!E T C ] LBA: 34 - !1565565838
Basic data partition GUID Data 3.00 TB [!E ] LBA: 2048 - !5860532223

Parameters tab: Bps 512 LBA Size 802GB.
When I select logical drives it shows up as 3TB. Parameters: Bps 512 LBA Size 3TB. Start LBA: 0 End: 5860530175

I'm pinning all my hope on you and hope that it would be as simple as restoring sector info or table from a backup stored on the disk, I read somewhere it gets stored twice and this might be an option, I have no idea how to do that.

About: The drive was originally put in an old enclosure and formatted to GTP since windows only recognized 2 TB. The drive sounds fine & is still new and have never been removed.

My knowledge on this subject is severely limited, but I do know a lot about W7 OS repairs, so I am very willing to follow instructions to the T. Any help would be highly appreciated. I wanted to scan it with minitools as it will recover data with folder structure as the drive have thousands of files sorted in many folders and the data will be useless without a folder structure. Problem is I don't have a spare drive to recover the files to.
Thank you in advance!

 

[DataMedic]

The fact that you can see sector 0 means that the drive is not totally dead. The partition table is telling us that there is a single 3TB NTFS (type 07) volume beginning at sector 256. The partition format is MBR, and the sector size is 4KB.

Windows sees your volume as "raw" because there is some corruption in a critical area of the file system. If the damage is not too severe, you can sometimes use a Ubuntu Live CD to mount the file system. Otherwise you would need data recovery software. If possible, clone your drive, sector by sector, and then run data recovery software against the clone.

That said, I would first examine sector 256. It should be an NTFS boot sector.

To this end, launch DMDE, uncheck the Show Partitions box, select your Physical Drive, and OK.

Then select Editor -> Goto Offset -> sector 256 -> OK.

If you select Mode -> Hexadecimal, you should an "NTFS" signature near the beginning of the sector.

You might also like to examine the drive's SMART report using HD Sentinel or CrystalDiskInfo. Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.

Good day fzabkar.

I hope you can assist me with a similar problem. I searched for days and found a few of your posts and I think you are the only one that seems to know what they are doing. This is my 1st ever post for help so pls excuse if I should've started a new thread.

Problem:: Power outage while data was being written to a WD 3 TB, I suspect the job was done since it was a small file but I'm not sure . After restart I received a message to format drive. Drive shows up as basic, raw & healthy 2794.52 GB. Laptop Windows 7 64bit. I encountered this exact problem before and knew I should not fiddle as you pointed out in another thread.
I unplugged the external and connected it to another laptop running W7 (32-bit). Since I used it on both PC's I figured maybe it will work and hoped it was an OS problem. Still same issue.

I suspect something is corrupt and have the same issue as this thread so I downloaded DMDE to inspect but to be honest I don't know what to look for or do. I just figured I'll follow every post of yours till I can find a solution but I'm stuck. So far I haven't done anything to the drive. Tried to follow your instruction above. DMDE displays 2 physical drives, 1st for the one in laptop (Physical Drive 0) and the 3TB shows up as 802GB (Physical Drive 1). Selected parameters tab: Bps 512 LBA Size 802GB.
When I select logical drives it shows up as 3TB. Parameters: Bps 512 LBA Size 3TB.

I'm pinning all my hope on you and hope that it would be as simple as restoring sector info or table from a backup stored on the disk, I read somewhere it gets stored twice and this might be an option, I have no idea how to do that.

About: The drive was originally put in an old enclosure and formatted to GTP since windows only recognized 2 TB. The drive sounds fine & is still new and have never been removed.

My knowledge on this subject is severely limited, but I do know a lot about W7 OS repairs, so I am very willing to follow instructions to the T. Any help would be highly appreciated. I wanted to scan it with minitools as it will recover data with folder structure as the drive have thousands of files sorted in many folders and the data will be useless without a folder structure. Problem is I don't have a spare drive to recover the files to.
Thank you in advance!

It's probably some filesystem corruption. Try scanning it with the trial version of R-Studio: You can download it here

If it sees the files and can preview them, you'll just have to buy the program to recover them. As far as having another drive to recover to, I can't help you there. It's never a good idea to recover to the same drive you are working from.

 

[DataMedic]

Or you might want to check the drive first using testdisk: available here

See if it discovers any missing partitions. If the issue is in the partition table, then you might not need another drive to recover to.

 

[MusicmanSA]

Hi and thank you for the quick reply. Awesome. I updated my post the same time you answered. DMDS reports: There might be partitioning errors, see post above pls, it might be an easy fix for some but for me not so much! I opened testdisk but wasn't sure what to do, I'm so scared I destroy any chances I have of recovery!

 

[MusicmanSA]

Testdisk sees only 801GB of the 3TB but the data is there, scanned with getdataback but I don't have spare external. The note at the bottom say that it must detect correct size in order to continue. Surely a broken partition table can be repaired without having to scan for two days to copy recovery. I cannot believe a power failure can cause all this!