Plug in old hard drive, no software will load

[flynavy812]

New member, really frustrated, hoping this is something simple I haven't figured out. My old hard drive was pulled from my laptop, its a WD500GB drive. I have a USB reader to plug it in. I have downloaded multiple data recovery software, here is what's happening.

-If I plug in the drive, it spins up and shows as G in my computer. I cannot right click, double click, or otherwise do anything without getting the not responding prompt and it freezing.
-If I try to launch any data recovery software, the software "boots" but just forever stays in the "checking status" window and never loads.
-As SOON as I disconnect the drive, the software IMMEDIATELY boots no problem within a second.
-When the drive is plugged in, my WIFI will randomly cut out, I'm using an adapter on my PC for WIFI.

After much searching, I'm stumped. Because every search I make leads me to "how to get drive recognized" or "just launch the software and you're good to go" but I can't do either. At one point a year or two ago, I remember being able to at least look in the drive and see my files were still there, can't remember what process or system I used to do this.

ANY help is appreciated.

[flynavy812]

Update: out of curiosity I plugged the USB hard drive reader into my TVs USB port... all files are accessible and in perfect condition. This surely makes me feel better but now I want to figure out how to extract the data.

[flynavy812]

What happens if you plug another HDD to your system using that same USB adaptor ? Does it work properly ?

If so i bet your WD drive does have bad sectors and entries on RE-LO list that makes the drive to report by ATA very slowly making your USB adaptor to "hang" the system. Quite normal on drives with that sort of problem ...

Unfortunately I don't have another drive to test that with. On my old computer, I was having issues with it booting up and eventually freezing. Some days I could browse like normal, others it didn't want to cooperate. What could it possibly mean if I'm able to plug into my TV without any issues?

[flynavy812]

It's quite strange that you can plug it to your TV without any issues at all using the same USB adaptor / cables.

Maybe The TV set is sending way less read commands to the drive ? Maybe you did get lucky ?

At any rate you can try to download a live linux DVD and boot from there to see if it does detect your drive and if you can copy out the data to another drive using it.

Some quite good choices are either the hddsuperclone live cd download on the official web site or you can use Recovery Italy "ChallengerOS" live DVD - it's FREE - and you can try to see if the linux distros do mount your drive and allow you to copy the data out of it.

What is the full model of the drive ?

Are you willing to pay for professional data recovery if you can't extract the data yourself ?

Maybe there is firmware issues that limits the actions that you can do with the drive ...

Its model number is WD5000BPVT - 22HXZT3

My level of experience isn't too great, so the linux stuff would need to be researched. I don't think I would have a professional get involved. Its mainly old photos, music, and some go pro footage I would like to keep.

[abolibibelot]

You haven't provided the SMART status, which would help to assess the level of damage – or lack thereof – self-reported by that drive.
HD Sentinel can usually get the SMART status from drives connected in USB. (Commercial software but excellent to check all drives constantly and get warnings at the first sign of malfunction.) Although it would be better to connect it directly in SATA. Especially if your USB adapter / enclosure / docking station is in USB 2.0, as you'll be limited to about 35MB/s, whereas a drive like this could reach a throughput of at least twice that – if there are physical issues you want to pull out the still accessible data as fast as possible as you never know when it's going to fail for good.

It reminds me of this case I reported a few months ago :
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=37056
It could be a single cluster in an inconsistent state following a sudden power loss during a write operation; if it's located in a system file it can cause many tools to hang / freeze (even quite advanced tools like WinHex or HD Sentinel). And the solution may be as simple as overwriting that one cluster, which can be done with ddrescue. But doing a full clone / image first, with ddrescue itself or the aforementioned HDDSuperClone, would still be a wise course of action. And that's also a good way of locating the problematic area. The tell-tale sign in my case (aside from the SMART status being flawless) was that this particular cluster was skipped right away by ddrescue, whereas a physically defective sector usually causes a significant slowdown during the cloning / imaging process.