Hello all,
First time poster hoping for some light to be shed:

I have a Western Digital MyBook 500GB drive (sorry I don't have the model number on my right now)
The other day the drive tipped over (they usually stand upright)
Note that it was not running at the time, but idle.

However the drive did disappear from my list. After plugging it back in, the drive identifies itself as uninitialised (ie, not formatted)
When I launched my Disk Recovery software, the drive was identified as a 1GB capacity drive!
I selected to analyse the files on the disk and left it for about an hour, after which it managed to look at less than 1% of the content with nothing found.

The drive appears to run fine - no unusual sounds, clicking, or other horrendous sounds are emitting from it.
Just the problem outlined above.

So my question is: Is it hardware? Software? Are there any suggestions to recover data?

One thing I did try was pull the drive from the case and put it into an external enclosure I had - same result.

Could it be the PCB? Or should I just walk away and assume all is lost

Any help is appreciated, and please let me know if you need more information.

Cheers.

Apologies... I mistakenly wrote 1GB capacity - I meant 1TB (that is, the drive appears to be exactly twice the capacity)

First off, I think manufacturers should be held responsible for even suggesting that a drive stand upright. As for your issue, it seems reasonable to believe that there is now a physical issue, whether it be damaged heads or surface damage that needs to be diagnosed and overcome in order to recover your data.

Although I can understand your hopes that it might be a PCB, in a situation where a drive was bumped or dropped and it stops work is similar to driving your car into a tree and hoping that new spark plugs will get it going again.

If your files are of any importance, it is best to leave the drive off to avoid further damage and seek the assistance of a data recovery professional.

Good luck

_________________
Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Thanks for the input, Luke.
That's what I feared... I guess what confuses me is that the drive seems to mount - and the whole Double-Capacity bit - but has lost its formatting,

Luckily the drive was backed up or had uncritical files, except for two folders which has proven to be something I could really use back...
Whether its worth the hundreds to recover that one folder is a question I guess I have to answer...

I may be flogging a dead horse here, but I was experimenting a bit. Pulling the drive and putting it into a BlacX Docking Station and scanning the drive gave me a capacity of 226TB (yes, that much!) Obviously wrong.
Also, I pulled the drive out of a newer WD MyBook I had and swapped the buggy drive in. This time it read 2TB (4X the actual capacity)

Figured it's worth a shot trying to format the drive - no dice. Just gave me a disk error in trying to write to the disk.

Open to ideas, or you can just tell me my horse is dead and bury it

Then it's dead.

(most probably 1 head or more are malfunctioning).

Nothing you can fix or work with (to recover the abovementioned "folder").