Help needed: WD HDD shows in BIOS as 0GB but nothing in W7

[Airbumps]

Hey guys,

To be perfectly honest I don't know much about the inner workings of hard drives at all but I've been building PC's for about 20 years. Still, I'm hoping somebody here might be able to help me with my situation.

The Drive : Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB

Situation: I was using a program call TrueCypt to encrypt data on an external WD 2TB HDD. About half way into the job TC stopped and said that there were bad sectors on the disk and gave me the option of either stopping the encryption and attempting a recover of these sectors using 3rd party apps, or continuing to encrypt the data and TC would simply write 0's over the bad sectors. Given whats on the disk I decided to attempt a recovery as I've done that plenty of times before.

After closing TC I disconnected the drive, and then reconnected it again. This time, the drive failed to appear in Windows, despite the light on the USB HDD flashing. So I tried a few different ports, different cables still without success. So I figured I'd try and see what happened if I connected it directly via SATA.

Opened the external case and plugged the drive into a SATA port.

I am now able to see the drive in BIOS, however its listed as 0GB. The drive is still undiscoverable in Windows.

Before I call a bloody expensive disk recovery place, can anybody recommened any software or anything I may be able to try to diagnose what the problem is, and what I may be able to do to fix it?

The drive is only about 6 months old and had moderate use. Access was fine and its never been dropped or anything.

Any advice is MUCH appreciated!
Cheers,
AB

[BlackST]

Internal problem and if it is natively recognised as 0 gb. there's nothing you can do without specialized stuff (Hw). Get a complete diagnose in any case as something may be missing.

[Airbumps]

Really?

Just out of curiosity, what could possibly have caused a hardware failure like this?

Nothing at all I can do? Just send it to a professional?

[ColinK]

Have you made sure TrueCrypt is running before you plug in the external drive. It sounds like you encrypted half the disk and the other half unencrypted.
Have you tried the TrueCrypt support or forum (if there is one)? They might know what has happened.

[Airbumps]

Thanks Colin,

Yeah that was one of the things that crossed my mind as I know if you plug in a TrueCrypt drive that has been encrypted it will present as an unformated drive that cannot be accessed.

I've posted over at the True Crypt forums but it seems very slow over there and nobody has responded.

To answer your question yes, I have tried running True Crypt on it, but TC is unable to detect the drive and therefore can't unlock it.

I think I'm probably going to have to take it to a professional and see what they say. At least get a quote and see what they want to fix it.

[Vulcan]

FYI encryption of the disk would not affect the disk capacity reported by the BIOS, and so would not cause this symptom. That drive has an internal problem, as BlackST already mentioned

[northwind]

Agreed with Vulcan and BlackST. If this was a TC problem, most probably it would ask for formatting the drive or so. Wrong capacity means something internal, fw or mechanical.

[Airbumps]

Thanks for the replies guys. That sort of rules out TC and at least puts me in the right direction.

One more thing - assuming I took it to a professional who managed to sort the problem, is it likely that that would have access to the original data, or is it more likely the drive would just return to the state it was when it went kaput - Ie, half way thru an encryption.

I'm reluctant to leave it with a professional as the data is sensitve - hence the encryption in the first place.

Cheers,
AB

[Vulcan]

That sort of rules out TC

TC is ruled-out. It simply cannot cause a healthy drive to report a 0GB capacity in BIOS.

One more thing - assuming I took it to a professional who managed to sort the problem, is it likely that that would have access to the original data, or is it more likely the drive would just return to the state it was when it went kaput - Ie, half way thru an encryption.

If I understand your question correctly, the answer would be the latter - data which had not yet been encrypted, would be accessible (though I hope that professional DR companies wouldn't care and wouldn't check it for "sanity" if you asked them specifically not to).

However given that the encryption stopped (failed) part way through, I have no idea what mess you may be left with after a recovery, and what success (or not) TC would have carrying on with the encryption from that point, given that we don't know exactly what the disk did as it became unusable, during the encryption process.

[lcoughey]

You definitely now have two issues:

1. Drive is kaput and needs lab assistance
2. Drive is partially encrypted and may need lab assistance

Both issues are independent of each other, neither of which are cheap on their own, let alone in combination. Good luck.