Western Digital My Book Essential not powering up. How Can I use this drive as an internal drive WITHOUT losing the data?

[Prash_cool]

I got a 3 TB Western Digital My Book Essential external drive. It worked fine for 4 years without any issues and it was my main storage device. Now it was not powering up and I did tried with a different adapter but still the same thing. Clueless about anything, I thought it might work if I open the case and set it as the internal drive. But the drive showed as unallocated space in the disk manager. Also it asked me to choose between MBR or GUID. I had to choose anyone of them so I chose GUID. I thought then it might show up and I will get the entire data like it was before. But still the same now. Please let me know is there anyway to get everything. I got over 2.3 TB of Data in it, mostly videos as I work as a video editor. Some of the data is very important for me. Did those free data recovery software work? Is there anyway that the drive will work in its original case? Please help!!!

 

[DSzymborski]

EaseUS and Recuva are two of the most popular software recovery solutions and they tend to do their job. As long as the drive can be physically read, there's at least a chance of data recovery.

If software solutions don't work, then you're probably at the juncture at which you have to decide what's worse, the loss of the data or the significant cost of a professional data recovery firm.

Sadly, the best way to recover data is to not lose it in the first place. If the loss of a single hard drive can be that much of a disaster for you, that's a telltale sign of an ineffective backup plan.

 

[Prash_cool]

Is there anyway I can repair the external hard drive bridge? If that thing powers up the external thing will that drive work as before? I already made it into GUID partition. The data is important but I am not sure how much of it is recoverable.

EaseUS and Recuva are two of the most popular software recovery solutions and they tend to do their job. As long as the drive can be physically read, there's at least a chance of data recovery.

If software solutions don't work, then you're probably at the juncture at which you have to decide what's worse, the loss of the data or the significant cost of a professional data recovery firm.

Sadly, the best way to recover data is to not lose it in the first place. If the loss of a single hard drive can be that much of a disaster for you, that's a telltale sign of an ineffective backup plan.

 

[DSzymborski]

You could get an identical hard drive and do some transplants, but now that it's out and everything, your practical solution is to simply run software recovery. The more you tinker with a problematic hard drive issue, the less likely you are to recover anything. Given that you've already been playing with the partitioning, you're going to have to go the software recovery route anyway even if you get your external hard drive enclosure working again. So you may as well go the path of least resistance and try software recovery now.

Though it's an open question whether this particular WD hard drive uses hardware encryption, which further complicates the issue. Generally speaking, the best external hard drive solution is to get a normal, internal hard drive and a standalone hard drive enclosure, to avoid issues like this.

 

[Prash_cool]

I know the model is not available anymore and chances of finding a similar drive is rare. I tried with free version of Ease Us. It showed up with some files after some time. But I couldn't see them and the format of the video files was .swf

You could get an identical hard drive and do some transplants, but now that it's out and everything, your practical solution is to simply run software recovery. The more you tinker with a problematic hard drive issue, the less likely you are to recover anything. Given that you've already been playing with the partitioning, you're going to have to go the software recovery route anyway even if you get your external hard drive enclosure working again. So you may as well go the path of least resistance and try software recovery now.

Though it's an open question whether this particular WD hard drive uses hardware encryption, which further complicates the issue. Generally speaking, the best external hard drive solution is to get a normal, internal hard drive and a standalone hard drive enclosure, to avoid issues like this.

 

[MarkR69]

I got a 3 TB Western Digital My Book Essential external drive. It worked fine for 4 years without any issues and it was my main storage device. Now it was not powering up and I did tried with a different adapter but still the same thing. Clueless about anything, I thought it might work if I open the case and set it as the internal drive. But the drive showed as unallocated space in the disk manager. Also it asked me to choose between MBR or GUID. I had to choose anyone of them so I chose GUID. I thought then it might show up and I will get the entire data like it was before. But still the same now. Please let me know is there anyway to get everything. I got over 2.3 TB of Data in it, mostly videos as I work as a video editor. Some of the data is very important for me. Did those free data recovery software work? Is there anyway that the drive will work in its original case? Please help!!!

I have had similar problems with a few My Passports and My Books. Many times the drive was fine, but the internal usb interface got flaky or would work intermittently, showing a blank, unformatted drive. I have removed these from the case (carefully - it is not easy) and disconnected the usb interface, and sucessfully restored the drive using direct internal sata connectors. You may have already scrambled some data by selecting the GUID if option if the drive was previously MBR.