Slow and dying WD Passport. What are my data recovery option

[ZOG]

Hi guys,

Basically i've got a dying 1tb WD Passport. I'm not exactly sure what the issue is, but i think it's a corrupted data directory... Apologies in advance for the rambling post, the details are important but i'll try keep it brief!

I've pretty much filled it in its entirety with a lot of precious data after downsizing my internal storage to small SSD, and foolishly don't have a back up of a lot of the files... (a backup of a backup?!)

I'm running Mac OS 10.9.2. I do have bootcamp, but i haven't tried opening the drive in that partition yet...

Basically, upon plugging it in, the drive appears on the desktop fine, i can open it in Finder, but it'll take minutes for the files and folders to appear. Within some subfolders, the files don't seem to appear at all, despite 'Get Info' showing the correct amount of space usage for whatever given folder... Even the folders that do eventually display their contents correctly are really dodgy with some files taking ages to open, or not opening at all...

Here's an annotated imgur album that illustrates the issue a little better. http://imgur.com/a/XO8z6

So Disk Warrior couldn't help anymore. And i'm pretty sure Disk Utility is useless for this, although i haven't tried extensively...

Here's the real kick in the nads though. After waiting for the files in my 'Films' folder to appear one by one, i tried to copy one the smallest film to the desktop to test it. It estimated 6 minutes to transfer a 450mb folder, which was horribly slow compared to how it used to run, but if it worked then i wouldn't have minded. Not only was it excruciatingly slow and irregular, sometimes slowing down to around 2mb/30seconds or more but it eventually got stuck on 386mb or something... an error message popped up and disappeared before i could even read it and i cancelled the transfer... This was around 10-15 minutes after starting the transfer.

I have a replacement 1tb drive coming in the post that i was hoping to transplant my files onto... but after the failure to copy a >500mb file off this dying HDD, it's not looking good for the other 977gb... The files are so close, but yet so far!

Would trying to clone the drive with SuperDuper simply be pointless at this stage?

SO my question is what are my options for getting this data off this drive, if any? Is it simply a corrupted directory issue? And if so, is this solvable through software?

Or is this a job for the dreaded data recovery experts?

Hope someone can shed some light on this for me. Thanks!

[ZOG]

** UPDATE - Bulk of post above is now irrelevant... since posting my HDD has become 'corrupted and unreadable'...**

Apparently i can't edit posts, so apologies for the double post, and apologies if you read all that before reading this...

But yeah... since posting that, it seems that my HDD has ceased to be. It still starts up and whirs when plugged in... but no dice. Here's what happened...

I tried booting in Windows (using MacDrive to read/write the Mac formatted HDD) and seeing how the drive acted, and while still sluggish, it was noticeably faster as opening the folders and files... for a second i thought it was going to be perfect. But then i tried copying the same film to the desktop and it stuttered and crashed half way through. Explorer crashed and upon rebooting back into Windows, my drive was dead.

I got the error message saying 'disk structure corrupted and unreadable' or something along those lines. It showed up in the side bar, but obviously i couldn't open it... and because it's formatted in NTFS i can't run CHKDSK or anything, which seems to be a suggestion in various forum posts.

Booted back into OS X and the drive doesn't appear on the desktop anymore, nor in Disk Utility. It does appear in the drop down menu in Disk Warrior... however it won't let me graph or rebuild now and ominously reads that "Directory cannot be rebuilt due to disk hardware failure (-36, 2747)".

I've had a HDD fail on me before and there was a very obvious clicking sound but this is slightly different. When plugged in, it starts spinning and there's a very faint, quiet bassy thud that seems to happen on each rotation of the platter. However it was acting funny for ages, and i can't say whether this sound appeared just now or not as i only noticed it after deliberately putting my ear to it after reading some posts here...

So... not sure what to do now. I don't dare touch it anymore... It's nearly a full terabyte of data, both precious and replaceable stuff...

Question time, round 2. Now i've noticed that noise, doesn't appear on the desktop and that it's 'unreadable and corrupted' i'm wondering whether the data is even on it anymore anyway? Can they wipe themselves that easily? Or is it more like a safe with a lost combination, but the contents are still fine? Even if the data is mostly intact on there, is there anything i can or should do? Or at this point is it only salvageable by specialists? I've seen some eye-watering figures being thrown around for the cost of data recovery and if this is the only option left i'm going to really have to weigh up whether all the data is worth the figures i've been seeing...

SORRY FOR ALL THE WORDS! Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[HaQue]

simply - take it to a DR company before the next bold wording is even worse.

[ZOG]

OKAY THANK YOU FOR YOUR ADVICE

I hope your retinas have recovered... Was kind of hoping that was a last resort, but thanks for your input.

[HaQue]

as it looks like it is getting worse, it is the only logical response, sorry mate

[ZOG]

No worries, thanks man, i was only trying to dodge reality for the sake of my wallet. Brought it on myself too by not transferring the data after seeing the warning signs. Such a dingus... Anyway, i've heard some DR services offer a free quote which i feel might make the whole thing a little more manageable instead of being slapped with a colossal bill out of nowhere. Time to go do some research!

[warnerr]

while there are a couple disk duplicating programs that should be able to duplicate your drive jumping past the probable bad sectors a pro device will be hardware based. Very likely a small recovery fee on this as it is still 'working' so far. There are several good recovery companies on this forum. It should not be too bad yet.