Question WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo (failed controller?)

[AfficialNastee]

Hello guys!

I have my friends WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo that it doesn't show up when connected on a computer. I tried all sorts of things with cables and such with no luck until my friend that owns the drive told my that he plugged a wrong power adapter that has higher voltage.

The enclosure itself the LED blinks steadily white and there is a very hushed spinning sound from the disks.

He really does need to get access to the data and he was just about to unplug and plug them on a windows machine thankfully I managed to stop him cause the drives from what I've seen they are working on a RAID but no sure if its RAID 0 or RAID 1.

What can we do now ourselfes to see in first place if the drives are still ok and is there a way to determine what sort of RAID is running if there is one?

Thanks in advance!

 

[fzabkar]

Are both drives really spinning?

You should be able to infer the RAID level from the capacity of each drive (on the label) and the capacity that was reported by the My Book.

The usual result of an overvoltage in a My Book is a shorted 12V TVS diode on the HDD PCB. The simple fix is to remove this diode (D4) with flush cutters.

See my TVS Diode FAQ:

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=100&t=86

You can examine each drive with DMDE. Can you show us DMDE's Partitions window?

DMDE can assemble your RAID and recover your data, provided that the drives are not encrypted.

 

[AfficialNastee]

No the drives are not spinning with full power.

It's not my drive the owner doesn't remember what was the size when plugged. Also as I said the unit doesn't appear on the system so we can't figure out that way.

Also as far as we know the drives are not encrypted.
For the DMDE software should I run it on Windows or Linux? From what I know if I pull the disks out from the enclosure and plug them to desktop windows are going to mess up the partition table?

 

[fzabkar]

DMDE can run on either OS, and it can see Linux volumes in a Windows environment, and vice versa.

Windows won't mess up your partition table as long as you don't "initialise" the drives or format them.

 

[AfficialNastee]

By saying initialise what do you mean?

 

[fzabkar]

Windows will prompt you to initialise the drive if it doesn't understand the file system. Don't do it.

 

[AfficialNastee]

Ok I get it.

So just to check if I got the things right.

I am gonna take the drives out from the enclosure and before I get to the process of checking the diodes will try to plug them into the Windows and use the software mentioned earlier to examine/assemble/recover the drives.

In case the disks do not appear to the system and not spinning I should check for the D4 diode mentioned and just cut it ??

 

[fzabkar]

If the drives are spinning, then there is nothing for you to do on the PCB. Some drives have a standby power mode where they park their heads and spin at half speed. I don't know if that's what you are hearing.

Before you attempt any recovery, just show us the Partitions windows that DMDE displays for each drive. This will tell us which file system is being used, and whether the drives are RAID-ed or configured as a JBOD.

 

[AfficialNastee]

I wouldn't really say the spinning like half way or like they are on IDLE state it sounds a bit weird to be honest, a little hushed sound that is looping or maybe is just me.

Anyways tomorrow morning I will try to connect the drives as stated and follow up with the screenshots you are asking.

Thanks a lot for the help and the info.

Your forum as well looks great with amazing information available, great job!

 

[fzabkar]

Hddoracle.com is Spildit's forum. I'm just a member. There are elements in the data recovery community who resent its existence, and it was the frequent target of DDOS attacks. The forum owner has disabled crawling by searchbots, so it doesn't appear directly in Google and Bing searches.

As for the sounds, if they are very faint and repeat at short intervals, it may be that you are hearing "stiction". That's when the heads are stuck to the platters and the motor is "buzzing" in an attempt to get started.

 

[AfficialNastee]

Hello @fzabkar

I downloaded and private messaged you the screenshot you asked for.