Hi,

Last night I was using my WD My Passport Ultra connected to my laptop but had performance issues accessing files so disconnected it by pulling the cable out then reconnecting, as I have done lots of times in the past. Now I am unable to view the drive at all. So it appears I have corrupted the partition of the drive by not ejecting properly before disconnecting.

The drive is full of years of videos, documents, data, pictures and memories that I just cannot afford to lose.

When I plug it in my OS recognises it with the windows bleep and it is listed in device manager as USB Mass Storage however there is no drive letter mapped through Windows explorer.

If I use a different USB cable I get the same and if I use a different Win 7 laptop I also get the same so it is definitely the HDD.

If I run diskpart list I can see it listed as Disk 2 and can select it but it lists as 0 KB. If I run Diskpart volume I can only see my onboard HDD Volumes. If I select Disk 2 and run list partition it says there are no partitions to show. I'm not aware of any diskpart commands similar to chkdsk that I can run against Disk 2.

If I check disk management it's listed as Disk 2 unknown and prompts to initialise disk but when I do this it errors Virtual Disk Manager "The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error"

I have downloaded Easeus data recovery, Easeus partition manager and MiniTool partition manager and I can't get any of the software to recognise that the USB drive is plugged in. It only pickups up my two onboard laptop HDD's. I've also downloaded WD Lifeguard Diagnostics which does recognised the USB drive but lists as 0KB. When I run Quick test, Extended Test and View Test Result against the drive all "Pass" but I still can't access it and it shows as 0KB and "not available". I've tried installing WD Drive Utilities onto my laptop but for some reason it hangs on install or when it says it's finished it's not actually installed.

I know the data is still on it and I really don't want to format and lose years worth of memories. I did not use or like any of the proprietary software on my faulty WD HDD when I bought it - I just formatted it then used it as an unencrypted removable HDD so don't use the utilities, encryption or any passwords. But I understand these USB drive use some sort of encryption chip which may be stopping DIY recovery like EaseUS detecting?

Can anyone recommend a process and piece of software I can use to recover?

Thanks,

Grizzly

The drive appears to be faulty, given that it's not even recognised by recovery or diagnostic software.

No regular software wil simply "fix" it

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Look like drive has slow responding problem and may be something else, but I don't see how you can solve problem without special tools like pc3000. I would say go to pro.

If you have important data on it, then you should consult some professional. The damage exceeds, each time you plug in and try some fake software.

If your drive is showing zero capacity this is a firmware / hardware failure of the drive which no software can fix.

I can highly recommend you take it to pcimage if you are in the UK.

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Web: https://www.day1data.de

I'm shopping around for quotes. How much would you charge to recover the above?

These tests are SMART tests. :?

Can you see SMART data with tools such as HD Sentinel, CrystalDiskInfo or smartmontools (Linux)? (I suspect that you won't see anything.)

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A backup a day keeps DR away.