WD My Passport - Data recovery

satanicguardian

satanicguardian

satanicguardian

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Hey guys, looking for some general advice please!

I have a 1TB WD My passport which has been in regular use for about 10 months, it's still in warranty and being RMA'd, but I'd like to try and get the data off it beforehand!

Basically I plug it in, it spins up, whirrs a bit, loads the WD drive unlocker software (the password that's required before access to data). After this pretty much nothing happens, disk manager shows it as a 939GB unallocated partition, is this an example of bad sectors?

The drive has never been dropped, knocked or mistreated. I just plugged it in the other day and it started making weird noises and now won't do anything - I had hundreds of gigs of pics, music, games and films on it + some important work backups... total pain!

Advice pleaseeee!

Thanks,

Jamie
 
Have you tried to access it from another machine?
With it going back to WD you are a little limited to how much you can do. I guess its a matter of Cost vs the value of the data.
And even the methods I could recommend may not help either and then you'd have no data and no valid RMA.
 
Restore from your backu...


If it's encrypted and damaged, then there's very little chance of getting anything back.
 
If the data on the drive wasn't actually encrypted, I would try running PhotoRec over it:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
It's free and pretty good at recovering files, although it doesn't get back filenames or folder structure so you might end up sifting through thousands of files to find ones you're actually after.

If the data on the drive was encrypted (which requiring a password sounds like it was), as Bledd said you're very unlikely to get it back. You're then looking at serious NSA-levels of time, effort and equipment to recover anything, or getting "lucky" and finding you were using an encryption with a known back door or vulnerability/exploit.

Data security/encryption, excellent when someone is trying to get hold of your data, not so good when that person is you. :(
 
sorry bit late for you but if youre talking about the mobile usb3 versions then these drives are best avoided. lost count of how many people at work have bought in their personal drives that have failed.

annoying that the USB port is soldered to the hard drive so you cant even strip the drive out of the case and recover/re-use it like many others.

there seems to be something very poorly made with these drives.
 
Hey guys, thanks for all the replies!

I've got a tool called EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, it's somehow managed (very very slowly) to convert the dead partition in a RAW partition and is actually finding data (it's found 1% so far).

I paused the search and attempted recovery of a 200mb folder, which I can safely say has actually recovered all the files without corruption (holy crep!).

I'll keep you guys updated, this software is impressive so far!
 
Recuuva it think it's called is a tool I have seen mentioned on here quite a few times. It's also free

Glad to hear your getting data back though
 
satanicguardian said:
Hey guys, thanks for all the replies!

I've got a tool called EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, it's somehow managed (very very slowly) to convert the dead partition in a RAW partition and is actually finding data (it's found 1% so far).

I paused the search and attempted recovery of a 200mb folder, which I can safely say has actually recovered all the files without corruption (holy crep!).

I'll keep you guys updated, this software is impressive so far!
Click to expand...

Hows it going with the data recovery, did you manage to get anything useful and readable off it after you did the scan?
 
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