WD Caviar Green HD Crash

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Can anyone please help? I bought a WD My Book Essential USB drive a few weeks ago and stored all my pics on it (40+ GB). Now the USB plug has cracked off in the drive. I was able to get the drive out of the enclosure (turns out to be a 1 TB Caviar Green HD) and plug it into my desktop, however it now tells me that it cannot read this drive and to initialize, ignore, or eject. Any help? Can someone help get my data back?!?!? Please help!
 

chscag

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Never store valuable photos or other data on any drive, external or internal without a backup. Drives can fail, even new ones.

How is the drive formatted? FAT-32? NTFS? HFS+? If the drive is formatted as FAT-32 (unlikely for a drive that size) or NTFS, you might try attaching it to a PC to see if it can be read.

If the drive electronics are damaged, the only way you're going to recover those photos is by sending the drive to a data recovery specialist. And that's going to cost as much as your computer - for a drive that size.

Regards.
 
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Backups

Yeah,
I guess I am learning the hard way that now that drives are so cheap, I should pop for the extra drive and store the valuable stuff in a RAID setup. I can't remember what I formated the drive in, but I thought since I had plugged it into a PC at one time that that might have been the problem. I tried to read it in Vista (via Parallels) with no luck. I think I formatted the drive as HFS+ but I can't remember. I am however having some luck with Data Rescue 3 from Prosoft Engineering. The Quick Scan found nothing but the Deep Level scan I believe has found all my files (at work right now and the scan started last night and was going to take 9 hours). It found several thousand MP3 files I had stored on the drive before I went to bed. So hopefully when I get home I will find I just need to purchase that for $99 and can recover, then just reformat the drive and purchase a new enclosure, or RAID it.

Thanks
Fxguy
 

chscag

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OK, that's good news. Data Rescue III in my opinion is the best at recovering data off "dead" drives. Apparently the drive electronics are OK because DR III can access it.

One bit of caution here.... If that drive is still under warranty (it should be) ask for a RMA from WD and have them replace it. I would no longer trust that drive to store anything. If it failed once, it's going to again.

As for your valuable photos: The best place to store them is on DVDs not a hard drive, raided or not. One of these days when Blue Ray is more affordable, that would be even better. :)

Regards.
 

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