HDD GURU FORUMS

I'm trying to recover data from an external HDD that failed. It shows up in device manager, but not in disk management and the tool itself. Any ideas if I can recover info from it, or must I try Linux magic?

Hi,

You need to give us more information. How did the hdd fail ?

When you say it doesn´t show in disk manager, does it show as non-partitioned, or it doesn´t show at all ?

Device Manager is probably detecting the USB-SATA bridge rather than the HDD behind the bridge. It might help if you told us something about this mystery HDD.

Frankly, I'm afraid to plug it in lest it becomes more damaged. Here's the full story:

For a while I had this strange issue where, occasionally, attempting to open a folder on the HDD did nothing for a few seconds. I double clicked and nothing. If I waited, or clicked a few more times, after a few seconds the folder opened and everything was back to normal. Clicking obsessively for all those seconds lead to the folder being opened in a new window. After the HDD died, I presumed this might have been the error correction struggling to cope, but I have the same issue on another HDD that hasn't failed and that is much newer and not used too much, so I doubt that's the issue. Investigation revealed that it might be an OS or driver issue.

Anyway, one day, attempting to save a word file on the HDD lead to Word freezing. I moved the file on my desktop and worked on it there. After finishing, I tried to move it back, only to get a write error. After that explorer could barely move inside the HDD. Windows Explorer just couldn't handle it. I managed to enter with cmd, while the HDD still had a drive letter assigned to it, but it eventually died completely and wouldn't be accessible in any way. No drive letter, not visible in drive management.

However, the thing still appears in the device manager with it's real name (WD Elements external hard drive or something like that). I read somewhere else that attempting to access it while it's failing may lead to even more sectors dying, so I tried to limit access to it.

I could plug it in again and get some screenshots, but I'm afraid I'll lose even more data.

MaxRavenclaw wrote:However, the thing still appears in the device manager with it's real name (WD Elements external hard drive or something like that).

WD Elements ... is the USB-SATA bridge as explained already by "fzabkar" above

First things first... If your data is important enough to you then you should seek professional data recovery. Any further attempts you make to access your drive could cause more damage and reduce the chances of recovery.

But if you are not willing or able to pay for data recovery and insist on attempting it yourself (and willing to risk loosing your data!), then I answer yes to the above, you need to try some Linux magic as Windows will just keep trying to kill your drive every time you plug it in. You will likely need to clone your drive to recover any data using something like the popular ddrescue, or the newer and not as well known hddsuperclone. Since it is a WD it is possible it suffers from the "slow" issue. Do a search for "WD slow fix", and if after going over those search results it sounds like it may apply to your drive, add the word "hddsupertool" to that search. HDDSuperTool is the only known (at this time) free tool that can apply the WD slow fix to a USB drive if that is the case, but it doesn't work on all drives. Good luck.

Thanks to everyone for the help so far. I'll try using HDDSuperTool to fix the WD Slow issue, as it might be just that. If it isn't, then so be it, I don't think any of the data is that important, but I'd like to recover it if possible.

Thing is, I can't seem to figure out how to use HDDSuperTool. Could any of you please give me a hand?

Are you having trouble getting HDDSuperTool either installed or executing it, or are you getting that far and can run it but don't know how to use it? HDDSuperTool only runs in Linux, and the readme file on the website ( http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool/readme ) has instructions for installation and/or running it without installing. If you are able to run it then just start it from the command line without any options, choose the target drive from the list of choices, choose VSC from the menu, and run the mod02 and mod32 patches (run mod02 first as it is really the one that does the major part of the fix), power cycle the drive and hopefully the drive will be more responsive.

If you are having trouble getting to the point of being able to run hddsupertool, then please advise exactly what Linux media you are using to boot from.

Also, even if the slow fix works, you should still image/clone the drive and then recover the files from the clone. Even if the drive seems fine, it WILL have bad sectors somewhere, and you should not try to get files directly off of the failing drive even if it seems like it is working fine.

Oh, it only runs on Linux. That explains it.

So there are no Windows tools that can help. Well, I guess I'll have to postpone this until I get a Linux set up, then.

Thanks for the assistance so far!