I'm hoping that someone might be able to point me in the right direction.

I am trying to recover data from a WD WD2500BJKT (250 GB SATA drive). It shows up as an unallocated (unpartitioned) drive after a bad shutdown. The laptop battery was accidentally removed while Windows XP was running. The drive is two years old and has no previous history of problems. It was defragmented two days ago and the SMART status was OK then. The drive still spins up, is properly recognized and isn't making any unusual sounds. So my initial thought was that I probably just have a corrupt partition table rather than a failing drive.

I don't have a desktop computer to plug the drive into, only laptop computers. So I put the drive into an external USB enclosure. With the drive connected via USB, the WD Lifeguard diagnostic fails on both short and extended tests with "08 too many bad sectors". While testdisk shows only a couple of read errors while searching for the partition structure, but is painfully slow to read the drive. About two minutes to read each cylinder (estimated 1,000 hours for the drive). Both programs properly identify the drive model, size and geometry. But neither can read the SMART status via USB.

So it's not clear to me if this is just a partition table problem or a drive that is failing in a sudden, massive manner. My question is whether running the diagnostics through the USB interface is a waste of time or if it's a non issue and that the drive actually has suddenly developed numerous bad sectors. It's worth buying a desktop system for data recovery if I have a reasonable hope of recovering a large portion of the data. But I would have no other use for the desktop and would rather not spend the money if it's clearly a lost cause. While the data is important to me, this is a personal laptop and I can't afford a commercial data recovery service. Does anyone know if the USB interface is an issue for data recovery?

Main lesson learned: I should have been backing up weekly instead of every few months.

try this. download r-studio emergency. connect the damaged drive to the laptop MB and have a good working drive connected via usb. boot from r-studio emergency clone damaged drive to usb. Or use media tools professional to clone the same way with usb support selected on startup. the use Getdataback ntfs to analyze the image.

Your drive should be imaged. If would be outside of the USB case better.

Thank you for the advice. It makes sense to image the drive in case it is failing. I am now waiting for the image scan to complete & see if anything is recoverable.

FYI, you can use either HD Sentinel or HDDScan to retrieve your SMART data via USB.

http://www.hdsentinel.com/
http://hddscan.com/

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Just wanted to thank all of you for your valuable advice.

Imaging the drive and running Getdataback shows a pristine file tree, with about 90% of small to moderate sized files actually opening (appearing valid). I experimented with rebuilding the partition table with a hex editor and after a few wrong guesses, believe that I now have it right. Now 99+% of the user files appear intact. I made a second image after editing the PT and will keep both until I can test the recovered files further.

Actually the drive boots at this point, just needed to reconfigure a few Windows services & 8/60 programs appear to have messed up configurations. User files appear completely intact. Since I don't know if the OS is really stable, I will be formatting the drive & reinstalling the OS. No physical failure in this case. The drive tests fine with WD's diagnostic (short & extended tests & SMART). No apparent bad sectors and no viruses/malware. The WD messages about bad sectors were apparently erroneous; WD data lifeguard doesn't appear to work properly through USB. So apparently just a bad PT/MBR due to the bad Windows shutdown.