HELP!!! HHD lost data

[Philip G Hunt]

My WD My Book Studio has suddenly stopped working. It contains ALL my backups of sessions (yeah I know. More fool me). Does anyone know how to recover lost data?

Any advice would be warmly welcomed. ??

[Glenn Stanton]

depending on the failure - i've found many times that the power supply and/or power regulator in those types of units are the problem. so, for like 6-7 failed drives (several brands) devices now, i remove the disk drive itself and use a USB adapter unit (which also supplies power for older drives), then copy all of into my cloud storage (2 different services for redundancy). label the disk and put it into a static-free bag.

it's something similar to this: https://smile.amazon.com/Converter-External-Universal-Function-Software/dp/B00EHDTRJ6/ which i purchased about 4 years ago. 

only one drive was not recoverable using this method as the disk drive controller was shot, so i sent to a data recovery place which was able to directly access the drive (it was a small HDD and i didn't have any other like it or i would have swapped the controller board...) that was $150 for the service and they returned the content on a new disk drive (200Mb).

Edited January 17, 2023 by fossile

[Philip G Hunt]

@fossile thank you for the help. Luckily I was able to revive the drive using a disk partition tool. It seems the directory had become corrupted and just needed rebuilding.

Luckily no data seems to have been lost. I then spent 2 days backing everything up onto 2 extra external drives. 

I've had problems with the power cable in the past. I had to splice some cables in that case.

Cheers

[Jack Stoner]

I just went through a problem with a Seagate USB connected hard drive.   As it turned out the actual hard drive was OK but the internal interface was bad.

Disassembled the unit and put the hard drive in a new external enclosure and all is well.

 

[user905133]

6 hours ago, Philip G Hunt said:

Luckily I was able to revive the drive using a disk partition tool.

This reminded me, every once in a while a Windows 10 Update will change something that makes an extended partition on one of my hard drives disappear.  The first time it happened, it took a few days to research the problem and find a solution.  I now have the HDD manufacturer's problem-solution page for this bookmarked.  IIRC the solution involves running their partition manger which reinstalls something without changing any of the files in the partition.

Edited January 27, 2023 by User 905133

[rsinger]

On 1/27/2023 at 12:24 AM, Philip G Hunt said:

@fossile thank you for the help. Luckily I was able to revive the drive using a disk partition tool. It seems the directory had become corrupted and just needed rebuilding.

Luckily no data seems to have been lost. I then spent 2 days backing everything up onto 2 extra external drives. 

Good to know. What disk partition tool did you use?

[Philip G Hunt]

20 hours ago, rsinger said:

Good to know. What disk partition tool did you use?

Mini Tool Partition Wizard.

It's has a function that will look for errors on the drive and repair them automatically.  And best of all, it's free.

[rsinger]

Thanks.