WD Mybook 500GB Data recovery

[madhatter]

Hello HDDGuru forum,

I know this is long, but I am trying to give a full picture of what I have done so far. Any advice is greatly appreciated!

I have a situation where I erased my photos and music from my primary HHD in an effort to open up some space and allow me to ghost the drive to a new larger drive. I got the new drive because my old one was getting too small. I was using a WD Mybook 500GB Home edition for an external Firewire backup. Anyway, Now my computer's OS won't assign a drive letter or recognize any data on it. I did have most of the pictures backed up on an internal drive stored in my fire safe, but when I hooked it up, I got "clicks of death" and the BIOS didn't see it... OH GREAT! Here is what I have tried so far:

First, I tried hooking the drive to my laptop, and it recognized that the MyBook was hooked up, but didn't assign it a drive letter either.

I have tried a couple of of data recovery programs. I tried HDD regenerator to see if it found bad sectors, and it just locks up (but does recognize it is there). I also tried Stellar Phoniex Windows Data recovery, and when it shows the drive status as 0 sectors. Note, this is with the UBS interface.

Next I took the case apart and hooked up the drive to a second SATA cable and then booted up the computer with my new drive the freed-up MyBook. The first boot was fine, but I can't find the drive in my computer or in the device manager... So I shut down and went into the Bios. I will get to those results next, but ever time I try to boot up with my new drive and my freed-up MyBook, the system just hangs up with a blank screen after the BIOS screen has went away.

In the BIOS, I tried running the SMART test. I did the short test and it took about 2 min and came up as OK. Then I did the extended test and it finished in almost no time, but also showing with out errors.. but the extimated time was supposed to be around 255 min.

The most recent thing I have tried to the MHDD program from HDDGuru. I booted up and began with the EID command, and it seemed to work. Then I began to SCAN the disk and I did this for a while, but ont completely. I got 5 timeout errors at the following:

275450028
393639834
471781941
393640344
491317914

I stopped the scan at LBA 549924812 and the drive parameter is LBA 976773168. I went to run TOF on a small section of the drive, but it told me it couldn't access the drive. Then I tried SCAN again, and I got the same message. I rebooted the computer, but MHDD got hung up in the boot up and I turned it off after about 5 min of it being hung.

I am trying to diagnose what other options I may have for diagnosing the drive. I am going to try the MHDD again since I have left the drive unpluged over night. I think it may be a hardware problem like the PCB or maybe even the head (but I haven't heard any odd head noise). Any advice that can be given would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance!

[networkpc3000]

hi,
what model of your drive? does it could be recognized the model correctly?

[madhatter]

The model # is WD5000AAVS - 00ztb0 and MHDD and the BIOS did recognize the model.

[jono-ats]

1. Some of the WD's have encryption on the fly on the small USB interface, so if you remove that, you won't be able to see any files.

2. The most common failures that we see on this model are a) PCB failure, b) head failure, or c) firmware corruption. All require knowledge, experience, and pro gear to diagnose properly and to overcome. Unfortunately, there probably isn't anything you can do yourself to get your data back.

Jono

[madhatter]

Thanks Jono for the information!

As far as option 1, may I have some success if I were to get another MyBook and use the USB interface to get past the encription? If so, would I need the same model?

If it is not that, I don't know what may work. I have tried almost everything I can try to do basic diagnosis. I don't think the SCAN in MHDD was working with this drive either.. I used another drive and it scanned automatically, where with this drive, I was using the arrow keys. I tried to use MHDD with this drive again, and it won't recognize it, but the BIOS still does.

If I need to professional (which seems more and more inevitable), are there any recomendation? Any idea of what cost range I would be looking at? If it makes any difference, I am really just concerned with the photos (which would be around 50GB).

Thanks again!

[laptokowiec]

5 bads for 50% of the HDD is not bad.
First of all you have to clone. You can use HDClone (free version) or DMDE (allows cloning for free).
Then you can try testDisk. It could recover your partition data.
If it fails you can use DMDE to scan the copy of hdd. If it succeeds you can recover your data (free version doesn't allow to recover all at once).

[jono-ats]

Yes, you'd need the same model - if indeed you have an encrypting PCB (as in the WD Essential series - with the chip that does the "dirty deed," made by Initio).

I'm a bit confused, though. How are you able to scan the drive and get bad sectors if you can't see it with the BIOS?

[madhatter]

I may have mistyped in a previous post. I can see the HDD in the BIOS, but I tried running MHDD for a second attempt at a scan and MHDD did not recognize it (note that it did recognize it the first time I tried, but it would not SCAN the drive)

I have the MyBook Home edition, but I do belive that it may have some encription built into it, but I am not sure. I will look more into this.

Thank you all for the help! As I go along, I am getting pretty close to needing professional help, but lesson learned. I need triple or quadruple backup in the future!

[BlackST]

MHDD works with drives connected to ATA/SATA ports not USB or 1394 !!

[madhatter]

Thanks BlackST. I did actually free the drive from it's MyBook casing and hook it up directly to the motherboard via SATA cable when I ran the MHDD diagnostic tool

[mattbrad2]

I was under the impression that the encryption used by the WD Essential was setup in software and that it wasn't "turned on" by default. You would have had to explicitly enabled the hardware encryption on the drive. Madhatter didn't indicate whether or not this was this case.

[madhatter]

Some more info for if it helps:

Model: WD500AAVS-00ZTB0
DCM HHRNHT2MBB
PCB 2061-701477-200 AB XT 5W02 58ZV 3 0004240 B 244

Thanks again!