No longer able to read external hard drive

[Peru]

Western Digital My Book Essentials 1140 3TB USB 3.0
Windows 7 Professional

About a month ago I was able to read and write files to this drive on two different computers running W7 Pro. It contains 1.45TB of data. Today when I connected it, a popup said that it needs to be formatted. I chose not to format it.

Computer management (both computers) shows that it has a drive letter assigned, but instead of “Healthy” it says “Raw.”

I have always used “safely disconnect” whenever disconnecting the drive.

Any suggestions on how to fix this?

[Bobby]

Sorry Peru, sounds like a goner. Maybe someone knows a utility that can help recover by resetting the device but I don't know of one. But not formatting was good.

[Bob]

Ouch!!

The operating system can't find a file system on the drive. It looks like an unformatted drive to the system, that's why you got the Format prompt. "RAW" simply means the disk is being accessed directly at the binary level and not through a file system.

At the very least, the boot sector of the primary NTFS partition has been damaged. If that's all that was damaged, there is a chance you can recover some or all of the drive. But, since you've always used “safely disconnect” when disconnecting the drive, there is a good possibility the drive is failing and the damage may be much more extensive. You may not be able to recover much. You'll probably want to replace the drive after you get what you can off of it.

If you want to try to recover the drive, don't format the drive and don't use checkdisk to attempt to repair the file allocation file. You'll need a disk recovery application that's capable of recovering from a raw drive. Most are commercial and not free. There is at least one that's Open Source and free -- that's TestDisk. TestDisk is rather low level and hands on. It's not click through the buttons like some of the commercial applications. Be sure to thoroughly read the documentation if you want to attempt using it.

[Chuck Engels]

I have used MiniTool Partition Wizard for many disk repairs, including rebuilding the MBR and repairing partitions.
The tool is free and it has done wonders in some cases. If you need it you can find the download here
http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-par ... nager.html

[Peru]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I do have backups, so I guess I'll copy my backup files to a new drive.
I don't want to risk it happening again. I was just trying to avoid transferring 1.45 TB of data.

I'll have to check if there is any warranty left on this drive. If not, then after I copy my backup to a new drive I'll play around with trying to fix this one.

[George Tyndall]

I'll have to check if there is any warranty left on this drive. If not, then after I copy my backup to a new drive I'll play around with trying to fix this one.

Peru, I've never used the warranty for my crashed HDDs, as I have no desire to share my data with the manufacturer, in the event the company attempts to salvage it?

Am I being too cautious not to say paranoid?

[Peru]

I guess that it depends on what data is on the drive. If I did online banking, then it might be of concern.
In this case , it's my archive of captured DV tapes and video from SD cards.

The drive is under warranty, so I will request an RMA when I am done transferring my backup files to a new drive.

This will be my fourth drive failure:
-an internal WD- my fault due to inadequate cooling, but replaced by WD under warranty
-an external case failure (Seagate)- removed the drive and put it in another case
-a WD Green drive- I shouldn't have even bought a Green one, but I didn't know any better then.
- and this one

So far, I haven't lost any data because I have multiple backups.