Need help trying to repair or recover data on an external Western Digital 12TB easystore hard drive.

This thing has been working like a champ for years. Yesterday I accidentally bumped the desk and it fell over. Just from the vertical orientation to flat. Did not drop off the shelf, just fell over.

Today I noticed that the drive letter was no longer there and when I look at windows explorer the drive has a blue question mark over it. In Disk Management it shows up but it says unallocated and tells me it needs to initialize. When I try that it says device unavailable.

So it seems I may have damaged the drive.

I have decades worth of important files including family photos and videos on that thing.

Kindly save the lecture on backups - it's done and nothing will make me feel worse than I already do. I do have several cloud backups of *most* of these files but not all and I don't know what is at risk.

Can anyone help with some advice on things to try?

Is it just installing EaseUS or one of those types of tools to see what they can recover? Best tool you have used to recover data from an external drive in windows?

Am I screwed?

Thanks for any tips.

I've had decent luck with Recuva.

My in-laws main disk (Windows) got corrupted/damaged somehow and they hired a local guy (maybe Geek Squad?) to come look at it. He tried to various things (I wasn't there) and basically could do nothing. So, they bought a new disk and he re-installed Windows and their various apps.


They gave me the old disk and I used Recuva to get some pics and docs from it.


After that, fiasco, we bought them a MacBook and setup an external disk with TimeMachine to automatically do backups of the main/internal disk.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuva

Thank you! Got the recuva scan running.

Some people have reported better luck accessing a drive after putting it in the freezer for a little bit.

I tried it once but it didn't work for me.

If Recuva doesn't work, I've had good luck with https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I have had very good results from FileScavenger. It provides a choice of trying to recover the file system or a low level scan that does sector by sector and track by track recovery.

In the low level scan you will probably recover multiple copies of the same file where it was stored in different physical locations on the disk at different times. FileScavenger let's you see everything that is recovered in the free version but to recover files larger than 64kb you need to buy a license.

You will need another drive on which to store the recovered files.

https://quetek.com/

Just something to keep in mind- have a strategy for what you're going to do before you do it. If the heads are now in physical contact with the platters you'll have minimal opportunities to do a recovery.

Where are you located? I used to do this kind of stuff all the time even dating back to MFM and RLL drives.

By the way the freezer trick is pretty outdated for modern drives. In fact if there is any kind of damage that would break containment of the drive, you're pretty much going to end up destroying the drive by doing so.

92_Ag said:

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Just something to keep in mind- have a strategy for what you're going to do before you do it. If the heads are now in physical contact with the platters you'll have minimal opportunities to do a recovery.

Where are you located? I used to do this kind of stuff all the time even dating back to MFM and RLL drives.

By the way the freezer trick is pretty outdated for modern drives. In fact if there is any kind of damage that would break containment of the drive, you're pretty much going to end up destroying the drive by doing so.

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Im afraid it's something like that as none of the utilities I've tried have been successful so far.

I pulled the drive out of the WD enclosure and tried one of those USB docking stations. The drive shows up in disk management but still seems no partition and can't initialize.

I'm in McKinney.

92_Ag said:

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My go to method is to access the drive but not mount it, then do a sector by sector copy to a disk image, then work on the image.

I am in Dallas and if this is ultra important to you, maybe we can find a way to connect and I can see how bad it is. Probably not until after Tuesday though.

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So kind. Thank you. I will keep trying a few things and might ping you after the holidays. Wouldn't be bothering if I didn't know there are some valuable family videos and photos in there.

Been there as well my friend, unfortunately. I only offer assistance in instances such as these because I understand the gut wrenching importance all too well. Luckily I've been successful with like 95% of these kind of situations, even including decades worth of videos and pictures of trips worldwide for one of my physicians.

Be careful that any software or even your OS can work to write information to the drive whenever it attaches, which in itself can reduce the opportunity for data recovery. It's the main reason I don't ever use software or let the drive mount when working on a recovery.

The other thing that will not work in your favor is the size of the drive. Sector duplication requires space equivalent to the same size of the drive - so if it's 12TB, you have to have 12TB of space to write the data. It copies all sectors of the drive, even empty ones. Assuming you can work past any physical damage, a sector copy can be configured to just ignore read errors and keep writing data it finds on the drive to the image file. Then recovery efforts can be made to infer or recover data on the image file without addressing the physical errors.

Best of luck and I hope you can recover at least some of your data!

Caesar4 said:

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I've had decent luck with Recuva.

My in-laws main disk (Windows) got corrupted/damaged somehow and they hired a local guy (maybe Geek Squad?) to come look at it. He tried to various things (I wasn't there) and basically could do nothing. So, they bought a new disk and he re-installed Windows and their various apps.


They gave me the old disk and I used Recuva to get some pics and docs from it.


After that, fiasco, we bought them a MacBook and setup an external disk with TimeMachine to automatically do backups of the main/internal disk.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuva

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Also had some good experience with this software

92_Ag said:

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My go to method is to access the drive but not mount it, then do a sector by sector copy to a disk image, then work on the image.

I am in Dallas and if this is ultra important to you, maybe we can find a way to connect and I can see how bad it is. Probably not until after Tuesday though.

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What software do you use for this?

Tailgate88 said:

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92_Ag said:

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My go to method is to access the drive but not mount it, then do a sector by sector copy to a disk image, then work on the image.

I am in Dallas and if this is ultra important to you, maybe we can find a way to connect and I can see how bad it is. Probably not until after Tuesday though.

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What software do you use for this?

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I haven't played in the Windows space for disk recovery in a while but something like disk manager(management?) should have a selection for disabling mounting of volumes. I'm not sure of sector copying utilities here though.

On the Mac I use a little utility called Disk Arbitrator so I don't have to fool with command line.

In Linux/Unix you can use dconf-editor, or udisks settings, or gsettings depending on flavor/distribution.

To do the copy, for any Unix based system just use the dd command but make sure to access the raw disk (rdisk) volumes. Use the man pages to determine out the best copy strategy and flags for ignoring the errors you want to bypass.

WARNING:: you better check, check again, check again, and check again that you have your source and target defined correctly or this goes sideways fast. You're bypassing the OS disk management and reading/writing directly to volumes.

C@LAg said:

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eric76 said:

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Some people have reported better luck accessing a drive after putting it in the freezer for a little bit.

I tried it once but it didn't work for me.

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that is for when the drive arm that reads data and/or the head gets stuck.

the change in temperature may be enough for the metal inside to contract, freeing it from its sticking point.

does not help for any other hardware failures or for data corruption/

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It worked pretty ok for MFM and RLL drives but modern drives I haven't seen it work at all, ever. The internal tolerances are so much tighter now I don't know of any reputable recovery place who does this.

I had a problem with a dropped hard drive several months ago. I should say, these devices are very sensitive to a drop.
At first, I tried using data recovery software (I think everyone starts with it) but didn't succeed. I'm pretty tech-savvy, so maybe I did something wrong. I was very upset as I had very important data on the disk.
I decided that the only way out was to find a data recovery service and take my hard drive there. But having surfed the Internet, I read that sometimes files are automatically backed up to iCloud or OneDrive, depending on what you are using, Windows or Apple. I decided to check it and all my files were on my OneDrive. Of course, it was a big luck, but I decided to share my story in case someone also didn't think about checking the cloud.

A couple things. First, there is no reason to buy a spindle hard drive (at least for consumer use) ever again. You can get a 1TB external SSD drive on Amazon for $65 that will not be affected if you drop it.

Second, an iDrive account costs 69!year and they often run specials for 90% off first year. Money well spent.