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Recovering data from WD EARS drive

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Freedom Kira:
So, another coworker's problem.

He's not sure what happened either. Basically, one day he came home to find that his WD 1.5TB MyBook external drive was unplugged, which was apparently unusual. He brought it to work to see if he could access the files, and found that his computer wasn't picking up the drive.

We popped open the case (doesn't have any kind of indicator) and found a 1.5TB Caviar Green EARS drive. Took the drive out, and today we put the drive into an enclosure I had sitting around and tried putting that into the computer. Took a while (like two minutes), but the drive was detected, and so was the ATA/ATAPI bridge, but it shows up as an unallocated disk. Device manager picks up the drive and the enclosure properly, but does not assign a drive letter to the disk. Safely Remove Hardware just sees the ATA/ATAPI bridge.

What we would like to do is recover the data that is stored on the disk, then reformat the disk and put the data back on. It's only got about 200MB worth of photos. He was intending to back it up but never got around to it.

From my understanding, EARS drives are a bit... different to work with, mostly because of the 4KB sector sizes. So I'm not certain that just any data recovery tool will work. But since the drive is detected, the battle is probably half complete.

I had him try PC Recovery for now. Any other tools to recommend?

kureshii:
The usual data recovery tools should work. Though the EARS drives use 4k sectors internally, the firmware only exposes 512B sectors to the OS, so they effectively are 512B-sector drives as far as the OS is concerned. ‘True’ 4k-sector drives won’t be out in the market so soon, at least not until proper 4k-sector support is widespread in all major OSes.

The only concern is decreased write performance due to unaligned sectors, but this does not affect basic hard drive operation. Your usual data recovery tools should work just as well on EARS as on the older EADS drives.

Freedom Kira:
Awesome, thanks.

He's been running some odd HDD tools. The latest one he's trying gave him a slew of read errors (pretty much every sector).

He's insisting on replacing the controller board, even though I'm quite certain it's fine, despite the errors.

Edit: Knowing all that, do you reckon a dd would work?

datora:
.
If I were trying such recovery/maintenance, I'd probably mount the HDD directly into a PC, rather than an external enclosure.  By preference, I'd try to use a PC with the identical operating system as was originally used to format the drive.  Given it's a large modern drive, I'd also strongly consider Win7 in 64-bit, although a modern linux system might well have good options.  Most of them have live CDs these days, so you can burn an ISO to CD, boot off it and see if you've got the tools that'll read the drive ... and, again, maybe better luck if the HDD is directly mounted into the PC.

I used to rely heavily on restoration.  It's a bit dated by today's standards, but I've used it on Win 95/98/ME/NT/2K/XP in the past and pulled all sorts of amazing stuff from drives.

Might not hurt to contact Western Digital support.  They've been pretty responsive to me in the past when they find out I am a product owner that has purchased a number of their products over the years.  They might have downloadable recovery tools available.


[ oh EDIT:  Replacing the controller board is a last-ditch, Hail Mary tactic that usually ends up destroying the drive beyond all hope of recovery or future use.  It should be reserved for a last-ditch, Hail Mary attempt after EVERYTHING ELSE has completely failed. ]

Freedom Kira:

--- Quote from: datora on June 14, 2011, 08:08:12 PM ---[ oh EDIT:  Replacing the controller board is a last-ditch, Hail Mary tactic that usually ends up destroying the drive beyond all hope of recovery or future use.  It should be reserved for a last-ditch, Hail Mary attempt after EVERYTHING ELSE has completely failed. ]

--- End quote ---

I tried to tell him that myself, but... >.>

Edit: He said he tried the demo version of R-Studio and got a ton of read errors there as well. I've been recommending him programs that were mentioned in this thread, which I created last year.

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