Western Digital My Book Edition II 1TB failed

[DigitalWealthy]

My WD My Book Edition II (gunmetal w/ blue rings) I bought back in 2007 failed.


When plugged in the fan does not run, there is no apparent activity or noises except the outer blue ring stays lit. Called Western Digital, they stated the drive has failed but cannot fix the problem because drive is no longer under warranty. They suggested I buy a new enclosure and the problem would most likely be solved. I bought a Cavalry Dual-Bay dock and plugged in the two drives (2x 500GB Caviar SE 16 WD5000KS). They were originally formatted HFS+ RAID 0 with two partitions of 500GB (1 used as Time Machine backup, the other to store video files) each so I followed the same settings on the Cavalry Dual-Bay dock. These are some of the info Disk Utility shows on my Mac:

Disk Description : JMB352 RAID-0 Media
Total Capacity : 1 TB (1,000,215,707,648 Bytes)
Connection Bus : USB
Write Status : Read/Write
Connection Type : External
S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported
Partition Map Scheme : Unformatted

I opened Data Rescue v3.1 and ran a Deep Scan for 22 Hours. Browsing through the resulting scan I understand most of the recoverable data is from the Time Machine partition (which to be honest I don't care much) and NO SIGN of the other partition containing my precious video material. I do have a feeling the video files are still there, though.

Any ideas out there?

Thank you in advance for taking the time to help out.

[dmarques]

Hi,

I think there may be something wrong with your file system.
But that has to be analyzed at a low level, and that's a task that should be done by a DR company with some experience.

[DigitalWealthy]

Hi,

Thank you for your quick reply. Meanwhile, I have been running another Data Rescue 3 scan. This time around the drives are on the Cavalry Dual-Bay Dock set as JBOD instead of RAID 0. Trying to see what I would get as individual entities. Thank you for your interest.

[dmarques]

What ever you try, avoid writing anything to the drive, or else you'll start to loose data.

[robbie]

The new WD enclosures has encrypted drives. This could be your problem.

[einstein9]

i got the same case here with 1TBx2 hdd

with the help of Dr.Kiev he managed to re-build it again

after that, i made small research about this issue because i wanted to get this NAS (eth) back so i can use it again.

with the help of mdadm and bootable Linux ubuntu i updated the packages to latest and repaired it
and now its back working even better than before.

u may start from this point or ask Dr.Kiev about this

good luck

note: WD are using some sort of encryption for their storage as mentioned here. very stupid but this is how it goes.

[DigitalWealthy]

Thank you for the info, einstein9. I just PM'ed Dr. Kiev for help.

Meanwhile, could you please explain with more details about the process "mdadm and bootable Linux ubuntu". I live on OS X and occasionally Windows/DOS so unfortunately don't have any Linux experience. Regardless, at this point I am totally committed to resuscitate this drive. Thank you.

[DR-Kiev]

The new WD enclosures has encrypted drives. This could be your problem.

My Book World Edition II hasn't any encryption.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/network/networkstorage/

[DigitalWealthy]

I realized I did not specify the exact model number WD10000C033-000.
The correct name is My Book Premium Edition II, size: 1TB

http://support.wdc.com/product/install. ... 05&lang=en

Still not encrypted?

[DR-Kiev]

Still not encrypted?

Yep.

By the way , your drives:

(2x 500GB Caviar SE 16 WD5000KS)

is "Evil" drives, strange that they lived so long , change them in the near future or release.

[fzabkar]

Meanwhile, could you please explain with more details about the process "mdadm and bootable Linux ubuntu".

Attach the two drives to the SATA controller on your motherboard. Then use mdadm to construct a software RAID from those two drives, using the same configuration as your external enclosure.

However, the first thing to do is to backup your drives using a cloning utility that knows how to work around bad sectors, if that is the problem.

That said, it appears that your original WD enclosure may be faulty, in which case it may be easier to repair it than working on your drives. To this end, a detailed photo of the innards would help.

[robbie]

The new WD enclosures has encrypted drives. This could be your problem.

My Book World Edition II hasn't any encryption.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/network/networkstorage/

Sorry man, I've been reading about people with WD enclosures with problems of encryption.
When they try to use only the drive, or another enclosure, the drives appears empty.

[einstein9]

The new WD enclosures has encrypted drives. This could be your problem.

My Book World Edition II hasn't any encryption.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/network/networkstorage/

sorry Dr.Kiev, but i was referring to this website which helped me on re-building my NAS

http://zeroone.homeunix.net/~blip/computer/mbwe/

which leads here: http://zeroone.homeunix.net/~blip/compu ... -disk.html

thats all

[DigitalWealthy]

So. I scanned the two drives individually with Data Rescue v3.1 in JBOD mode and I was able to retrieve several files. I recovered some of them onto an external drive HFS+ formatted (guess what, another WD!). Although the directory tree and file names seem to have preserved the original name and placement, I was not able to open any of the Quicktime movie files which report the following error: "The movie could not be opened. The resource map is incorrect." As well, every other file type I tried to recover (PDF, xls, doc, etc...) seems to be corrupted and does not open. I believe this is due to the scan done in JBOD mode but, still it gave me hope and confirmed that my important video files are still there and showing. At this point, I wonder if there is a way to mess with the QT files using some resource editor (Rezilla?) to make them play back again.

[hightekk^]

Exact same issue here. Although the last post seemed a while ago I was wondering if someone could sum up the fix for this issue. I had no reaction from the external when powered on which leads me to believe its the enclosure itself, whatever hardware they have to start the drives up. Thus far I have dismantled the drive and validated that it has its 12v but still no activity to actually operate. Where do I go from here? Is it possible to just buy a completely functional used or refurbished ehdd and swap out the two 500 giger's? My setup wasn't mirrored and I utilized the whole TB, which would mean that my data is spread over both? Thanks in advanced!

[fzabkar]

An alternative to mdadm is DMDE.

DMDE (DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery):
http://softdm.com/download.html

AIUI, in DMDE you would examine sector 0 to locate the MBR. This would be the first member of a RAID 0. Then you could experiment with stripe size until the data
were visible.