My WD External hard drive has crashed

rose28454

buglawton wrote: »

I have had these drives apparently pack up on me (were not in any way recognizable by Windows) and managed to recover the drive if not the data, by reformatting and/or using a downloadable utility from WD's website to repair the low level format. It is a much deeper utility than Windows offers.

Some examples of the software - will depend on your model number though:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=111&level1=1&modelno=&lang=en

to keepo

It wont even switch on never mind be recognised by Windows. Really disappointed that I thought I had a solution to keeping our data safe and bang all gone!

googler

amcluesent wrote: »

IFAIK the "circuit board" contains EEPROM memory chips which contain all the configuration data from factory testing of the drive, inc. info such as the bad-sector map. Chances are if you swap the board from another drive, you'll get nothing off the disk. If the data really is that valuable, it's a data recovery firm and a bill of £500+.

So if you take the drive out of the enclosure, install it as a secondary drive in a desktop, and run a Chkdisk on it, won't that work in the same way? and then allow you to access the data - as long as it's the enclosure circuitry that's failed, not the drive itself?

busenbust

I absolutely detest the WD drives -- esp. the MYBook drives. Seen many fail. Buffalo does a nice usb3 one :cool:

Some of the Iomega ones are nice too -- see the above link also.

HTH

custardy

googler wrote: »

So if you take the drive out of the enclosure, install it as a secondary drive in a desktop, and run a Chkdisk on it, won't that work in the same way? and then allow you to access the data - as long as it's the enclosure circuitry that's failed, not the drive itself?

done it many times