I've got an acer easystore running windows home server I use as a central media server for my house. Recently I had one of my seagate drives fail and in the process of removing it from the pool backed its data up to a rarely-used western digital my book essential 3tb. This drive is probably 2 years old but I almost never use it so there is definitely no "wear and tear".

The backup drive has now failed before I was able to complete the restore of my media computer (the drive also had much personal information such as digital photos that aren't replaceable). This has been a source of much frustration. According to the internet I should never buy another WD external drive (fortunately I just picked up a 3tb LaCie - hopefully this works better) as they apparently fail all the time.

From what I can tell it's the SATA/USB controller that is sitting between the drive and the computer which has failed and is causing the problem. Plugging into any computer causes freezing until the drive is removed (although the computers will see that a my book was there). Plugging into the server computer will show the drive but only recycle.bin is there (no other files, although it correctly shows 2 of the 3tbs in use) and I can't read from or write to the drive. I have tried ripping the drive out and installing it in a desktop computer (I had to update the intel ahci drivers to get it to see the drive as 3tb instead of 750gb) but now I'm stuck.

The drive itself (removed from the enclosure and put into a desktop) shows up as 3tb (well 2750 or whatever) but uninitialized. My understanding is that the usb/sata chip fakes an older non-advanced-format drive for older operating systems (like xp or whs). When I try to use testdisk it can't find the partition data (although I am now running an advanced scan) but I'm wondering if I should try the alignment utility western digital has.

My understanding is that advanced format disks formatted in an older OS will be off by a sector and that this tool will properly re-align the disk as it would have been if formatted in a supporting OS. Since the bridge chip emulates an older drive I'm wondering if this basically means I formatted the drive in an older format and that if I run the alignment utility on the bare disk in a vista system that it will "correct" it so that I can read and recover all the data off of this drive before junking it. I just don't want to use this utility without fully understanding it lest I make my data totally unrecoverable (if we aren't already there).

There are concerns about encryption as well - I never used the wd smartware nor did I enable any drive encryption but google reveals that the crappy wd enclosure might have encrypted the data anyways (and wd states on their website they won't sell just the controller chips so I'm pretty SOL there). I'm hoping that is not a problem here.

Failing all this, would anyone recommend initializing/quickformatting the drive (assuming I can even do that, again google is filled with complaints about people being unable to (re)format these disks) and trying to use some data recovery software on the drive to pull everything off?

I have spent days trying to fix this thing without making it worse and it is driving me crazy - like I said this is more than just video game saves or something like that but contains precious memories (photos, etc.) that I cannot replace. If anyone can help me with this I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you so much in advance!!!

If the drive contains critical data, I suggest to you seek the assistance of a data recovery pro before your data is lost forever.

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

+1




If the data is important then dont put it at risk with random DIY fixes you could lose any chance of recovering the data.

Loki

While that is certainly sound advice, I am currently not in the financial position to be able to spend $1,000+ on having someone try to retrieve my data. Plus there is definitely some personal data on there that I wouldn't want anyone snooping around through (there have been a number of news stories about people stealing pictures and bank details etc from people's cell phones when they are serviced and those things hold only a fraction of the data!) so that is why I'm trying to do it myself if at all possible.

Does anyone have experience with the wd alignment tool? Does it work as I believe it to work? (ie: would using it on a 3tb mybook essential which has been opened and placed into a computer running vista cause the partition to appear correctly?)

Hi KevG, do you stil have the seagate? If company is reputable (lcoughey is part of one such company) you dont need to worry about privacy etc. Also cost might be less than you think, unless you got a quote.

An alignment tool is useless for your situation, as is reformatting the drive with the hope of future recovery.

These 3 TB drives are not always easy even for pros. There is nothing you can do yourself, except make matters worse. Accurate technical diagnosis of the problem is essential!

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com