Data recovery for external hard drive

Ashok_2

My Western Digital My Book external hard drive has suddenly stopped working, it was previously called "My Book" and now in my computer it appears as "Local Disk K", when I open it it says: "The disk in drive K is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?"

In my computer drive capacity appears as 0 bytes, but in disc management it says capacity is 320GB and 100% free, despite having nearly used up the full amount before..

I contacted Western Digital and they told me to try a data recovery software first, and if that doesn't work they would exchange the drive. But more important to me is recovering the data, mainly some essential business excel files etc.. There are movies and music also on there but they are less important to the business files I need.

I know there are several software around but please could people recommend the best ones, also I contacted a couple of data recovery firms and the cheapest I was quoted was £350 + VAT, and they said 99% they'd get the data back, and if not there is no fee.. This sounds okay, but I thought surely whatever they'd do there I can do myself at home (does anyone know what they'd actually do?!)

Thanks!

Asus_Mobo

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

Ashok_2

I was wondering if I use something like Ontracks software, there are quite a few options on it I can choose, is it possible they can make the problem worse?

Ashok_2

I've been running easyrecovery professional for the past few hours, still got 3 hours left, and although it doesn't tell me what files are found it shows "last file found" which changes every second, I see extensions ranging from .mof to .avi and .mp3 which is good I guess, I don't know what .mof are as I had none of them before..

But the thing is the name of files are not showing, ALL the file names are showing as FIL*number*.*extension*

Any ideas?

Ashok_2

Bump bump bump

espresso

Ashok wrote: »

Bump bump bump

Bump bump yourself!

:rolleyes:

dataclinic

But the thing is the name of files are not showing, ALL the file names are showing as FIL*number*.*extension*

Any ideas?

How did you get on with this? What it looks like is the software did a file header scan where it identifies some specific file types but then archives them under a new name because it cannot or is not setup to work with the directory structure.

superscaper

dataclinic wrote: »

How did you get on with this? What it looks like is the software did a file header scan where it identifies some specific file types but then archives them under a new name because it cannot or is not setup to work with the directory structure.

Don't think you're allowed links in your signature, certainly not adverts anyway.

dataclinic

My apologies, rules read and sig changed!

RibAd

I dont kow if this would be much help to you but when I was doing some research for a WD product, I stopped in their forum for info...

From memory I remember probs with the My Book and you can search here:

http://websupport.wdc.com/forum/