Any computer wizards? EXT HDD question.

My WD Elements 2 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive has worked great for 2 years.
Today, it started showing up as Local Disk F, instead of Elements F.
The PC won't read it.
Tried switching cables, switching USB ports, and another PC with the same results.

It shows up in the device manager with the proper name WD Ext 1021 USB device
It shows up in disk management:
F:
18630.01 613 RAW
Healthy (primary partition)

I've tried changing the disk letter with no results.
Every time I plug the SUB in, the PC tells me I need to format the disk.
I don't want to format the disk.

This drive has a ton of music, pics, and documents on it.
Even if it is bricked hopefully I could pay someone to get the data off.
I should have backed up, my backup..

Any ideas?
Thanks..

 

Chances are the disk, or the little USB module, that connects the disk are on the way out.

You can open the external HDD, and get to the actual HDD inside of it. Then attach that to the PC itself and see if it can read it to recover the data.

If the data is important, data recovery places may be able to handle it if you arent savvy.

Sounds liike you tried the basics. cable, and another PC.

The new way it shows up in disk manager says it is unformatted. If you format it, it may work for a day, or 300 days. but know its on its way out and formatting would help to remove any chances of data recovery.

You could try to grab DMDE and give it a go yourself. https://dmde.com/

 

Thank you..

If I can get this running I can transfer it all to the PC until I get another external.
Plus I'll get a big thumb drive and back it all up so I won't freak out if it happens again..

 

Always back your shit up minimum twice 3x is even better, I don't trust hard drives anymore after western digital took over seagate.

 

It is one of those things "I should probably" then put it off and forget about it.

I have all my music and pics backed up, but there are documents I stupidly didn't..

 

The simplest method of backup. is to buy 2 of whatever external you want, copy everything to the main one, and back that up to the secondary one every few days, unplugging the secondary when not in use.

 

There wasn't a Windows update involved, was there? Most if not all my problems have been traced to Windows knowing better what I want more than I do. Or that's the excuse.

 

Yeah, we have all been there, procrastination sucks. After a catastrophic fail....Lost a good chunk of my music and had to re burn 582 cds over again. The thing that sucked ass about it was going through 3800 cds to do so. I had a backup off site, but my sister couldn't find it

 

The dmde program helped.
I got some needed files recovered but it's a slow process.
I can only do one folder at a time with the free version.
There are a few hundred folders on that drive, although a third of them I probably don't need anymore..

Got some documents I must have right now for work and my main music folder.
Thank you for at least getting me what I have to have right now..

Another thing I noticed,
With the bad external drive connected, my PC runs terribly slow just to do anything.
As soon as I unplug it, the PC runs fine..

 

Western Digital (superior) does not own Seagate (inferior).

That being said, I have at least 20 mechanical hard drives ranging from 1tb to 4tb from both brands (and others) and have not had a major failure in probably 15 years.

 

I use cloud storage for redundancy. I would advise doing the same as you can set up auto backups and never worry.

 

This issue came out of the blue today.
Never been a problem since I bought it in 2020.
It's a 2tb drive with maybe 2% of data on it..

 

That's a good idea.

 

Yeah - external mechanical drives can fail pretty quickly because they move around and suffer shock. When you replace is spend a little more and go solid state.

Lots of software out there to help you recover. Hope you get your files back.

 

Did you upgrade to Windows 11? If so, did this problem arise at the time of the upgrade?

 

I obviously am wrong, thought they bought out seagate back in the late 90's or was it the early 00's....mind ain't worth a shit anymore.

 

I had a 2TB WD MyBook Live that stopped working last year.we had a lightning strike a couple houses down the street that took out my cable box, cable modem, router and the MBL that was attached to the router. I tried taking the Unit apart and removing the HD but none of my computers could read the data not even a Linux machine. Come to find out WD uses proprietary hardware encryption. I ended up buying another WD MBL with a bad hard drive and swapping onto the circuit board and plugging it in. This worked perfectly and I was able to copy all my data to a new NAS. Not sure the MBL is compatible with elements HD but you welcome to the unit if you want it. You might also look for a used device on evil bay. I think I paid $10 for the one I got.

 

Seagate bought Maxtor for 1.9B back in 05, if that's what you are thinking of.

 

My PC is too old for 11.
I'm running 10, this is my wife's old PC.
I have her even older one in the garage...

All I do is surf the web and email.
Maybe an occasional word document...

 

If you are going cloud, for backup storage. I recommend backblaze. The company is on point in data protection. Excellent api interface, if that's in your wheel house.

Couple things to consider if going "cloud" for anything. A cloud, is just someone else's computer. In this case, a business. Make sure you go with one you can trust. Like it or not, policy, rules, whatever. At the end of the day, they are in control of the bits you provide them. Not that companies are malicious, but they do have access to that data, quality encryption is a must.

Maybe a bit outside of what most consider. a small NAS, you can find them on Amazon or newegg, stocked with a few hard drives, will provide you years of use without a hiccup and if computer stuff is fun for you, you'll find lots of cool stuff you can do with them other than store files. (mine runs a couple media servers for my house, and an email server for my private domain)

 

First several ideas have been presented that may help. I used a program called RecoverMyFiles about 10 years ago and it worked well to recover all of my critical files off of a failed hard drive. The web site is https://getdata.com/recovermyfiles/data-recovery-software-download.php.

Before the recovery is complete, get cloud backup set up. If you use MS Office, you can get a couple of terabytes with OneDrive. It works well for me. My backup solution also includes a NAS with a Synology housing and an enterprise-rated NAS hard drive from Western Digital. This way, I have a full system backup AND online access to all of my documents. That is one of the most cost-effective setups I could come up with that had redundancy and reliability in mind. I use Acronis as my backup software because I have been using it for years. If I were starting fresh today I would likely use a different software backup solution.

One other thing: while SSD's are great for performance, when they die, there is no recovery. If you use them in you PC or laptop, make sure you have a good backup solution in place or you will lose everything when the drive failed. I was VERY thankful for my backup a couple of years ago when the first SSD I bought failed. And never use an SSD as your backup drive.

 

Yep that's it.Thanks

 

OP - These drives run on Linux and the interface board has a Symwave SW6316 chipset which applies AES-256 hardware encryption to all data. The easiest way to get your data back is get another enclosure of the same model and attach your HD to it. You

https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1002.pdf
https://community.wd.com/t/how-to-d...e-after-its-removed-from-the-enclosure/146588

It can be done with software. The encryption key is stored in a block near the end of the raw disk (raw = not in the enclosure). That key is encrypted, based on your password, or if none is used, on a factory-set key. You install it into a Linux desktop. Do not reformat. Instead, set up an encryption layer to simulate the JS528S chip that is on the MyBook’s USB-to-SATA PCB.

 

Could be the USB interfacing hardware, as mentioned, or the drive itself has a problem. Was it by chance dropped, knocked over, or bumped while it was on?

I like using SpinRite. It's not free .... but it works, if it's an actual data integrity issue. Version 6.1 is supposed to be out soon and significantly faster. While slow, 6.0 still works.