Western Digital 2TB drive has 'died'

[pewe]

I see there are a number of threads about drive failure which are similar to the problem I am having, but rather than hijack other threads please forgive me starting yet another one.

I have a TV Tuner/Media recorder/Player attached to my tv that I use to store all my movies as well as record programs off the tv.

The disc in it is a standard NTFS formatted 2TB Western Digital drive.

The unit has on it a usb port to attach it to the PC for transfer of files etc. and I use this facility to transfer movies off the PC onto the unit for watching/archiving.

The other evening I attached the unit to my laptop and transferred about 300GB of files to the drive and also did some re-organisation of the content.

I left the unit connected to the laptop overnight, and when I went to it in the morning the unit (drive) was no longer showing in Windows Explorer.

I looked in Disk Management and it was showing with no Drive letter. I added a drive letter and although it now became visible in Explorer which reported that the drive was not formatted - and Disk Management in now showed as RAW.

Looking through the threads here I followed some advice and tried various recovery programs to try and recover the files - but no luck.

Here are some things I tried:

I ran Diskinfo and the results are shown in the attached image - reported sector count errors

I also ran WD Diag tool which showed bad sectors and and asked if I want to repair the errors.

And in Easeus Partition Master there is an option to repair MBR for the drive

I also ran a program called MiniTool Power Data Recovery. This recovered over 11,000 files, but they were all unnamed and none were movies, most were .txt files (which I did not have on the drive) or mp3 - none of which played.

I have not followed any of the options to repair the drive (sectors or mbr) as I am not sure if that would be sensible or may damage the drive content further,

So what I am looking for from the gurus who read this thread are suggestions as to what I do/try next.

Thanks for any forthcoming suggestions/advice.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there pewe,

Sorry that you are facing some issues with your WD drive. 🙁
It seems that the HDD has some bad sectors on it. In case the HDD is still under warranty, you can just contact WD's Support and eventually RMA the drive(after the data recovery steps of course).

So, you have done the same as in this thread http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/288692-disk-1-unknown-not-initialized-unallocated.html, and all the recovered data was corrupted?
In this case, I guess you can try using some other recovery tools as well:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/280932-32-hard-drive-recovery

If the issue persists, then I guess you should try to rebuild the MBR(from the snapshot you have provided).

WD's Support: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=nEZLUl

Let me know how this goes,
D_Know_WD

 

[pewe]

Thanks D_K

I am rely frustrated with WD.
This drive was already a replacement a failed drive which failed under warranty. The replacement then failed too and this was a 'gesture' replacement for that.

I read that there were a large number of people who had experienced problems with this particular 2TB drive and asked for the second replacement to be a different model - but they said they couldn't do that. In fact both the replacements were reworked returns I believe.

I will try the solutions you suggested, but at present I have yet another software package running on the drive and it says '14 hours left'.

Ho hum - yawn - time for some tea and gardening (and maybe a sleep) while I wait 😉