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SON OF A BITCH! Has this ever happened to you?

C

COOLCAT88

TMF Master
Joined
Nov 26, 2003
Messages
825
Points
18
My Western Digital Mybook Essential 500GB External Hard Drive, of which I had put all my photos and Video Clips ( Tickle Clips that totaled 40GB), suddenly stopped working a few days ago! That means all of that which I had accumulated is now inaccessible.

Has this ever happened to you? Your computer or disk drive beame damaged, and your precious clips were not able to be accessed?
 
If you're lucky it may just be the a fault in the connections to the housing or power supply. If you really can't get it working (and have tried everything, including ruling out any potential problems with the PC you are connecting to), you should hopefully be able to take it apart and retrieve the actual hard drive inside. With that you can then either install it into a PC, or just buy a cheap new housing for it. Fingers crossed the actual drive itself still works and your data's fine.
Hope that helps.
 
Yeah, it's happened to me twice with two flash drives from hell!

One, I lost everything.....I mean everything! But I remembered I backed up most of what I lost to another drive which.......wait for it......broke in pieces in my hands!

I got really lucky; my PC guy managed to piece the thing together long enough to install to his desktop and I got another flash drive to copy it to. It had my resumes and all my grad school stuff on that one; I saved most of it.

I hope you can salvage your stuff.
 
I am digital artist I depend a lot on my files. I back things up several ways.

1st) I use a external hard drive. Like you mentioned. Almost all external hard drives die eventually and usually at least for me its rather sudden.

2nd) I record an image of the drive. Using software like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image (currently I prefer Paragons back up software but thats me :) ) and store that image both on another hard dirve and recorded to a DVD. Imaging software allows you to quickly restore a drive or your operating system in miinutes. Its a quick and fast way to get back up and running again.

3rd) I back up everything on Data CDs and then do bigger back ups on Data DVDs.

4th) I do many mini back up onto USB Flash drives which are very cheap now. You can get like a 4 pack of 4Gb flash drives for like 25 dollars. :)
 
Memory is cheap these days. Having files backed up is so easy. Just dont be like me and think "hmm, look at all that free space where I backup files.... I could use all that space!" :p
 
I did not have anything important on the drive. Most of my pics and other files were on my seperate iomega drive so that I am not worried about. It is all the tickle videos I have bought over the past 3 years that I am concerned about..
 
No. I have multiple back-ups of very very important source files, both locally and remotely. But at times, the hard thing is retrieval.
 
There is that company Carbonite.com that will back up your stuff for about 50 dollars a year. I have never used them but it sounds reasonable. :)
 
kurchatovium said:
There is that company Carbonite.com that will back up your stuff for about 50 dollars a year. I have never used them but it sounds reasonable. :)
Click to expand...

LOL... I know such companies may mean good service, but I could get paranoid with intellectual property. If I avail that, I will only encrypt the files until I forget how to decrypt. And that's a big LOL. *&^%$#@!
 
Bohemianne said:
LOL... I know such companies may mean good service, but I could get paranoid with intellectual property. If I avail that, I will only encrypt the files until I forget how to decrypt. And that's a big LOL. *&^%$#@!
Click to expand...

Encryption is always a good thing, in my humble opinion. :D I am very paranoid and anal about my files so you are right and that is one reason I dont use Carbonite. :p
 
miskiduk said:
If you're lucky it may just be the a fault in the connections to the housing or power supply. If you really can't get it working (and have tried everything, including ruling out any potential problems with the PC you are connecting to), you should hopefully be able to take it apart and retrieve the actual hard drive inside. With that you can then either install it into a PC, or just buy a cheap new housing for it. Fingers crossed the actual drive itself still works and your data's fine.
Hope that helps.
Click to expand...


This. If the drive is ok it's NBD. If the drive is bad, you're looking at a real pain in the ass best-case, and impossible worst-case.
 
Well see, the weird thing is , my computer recognizes the drive. Whenever the Software comes up ( WdSmartWare), it prompts me to put in my password. I do that, but for some reason, it doesn't go through. I think it may be a bad sector or something else within the hard drive itself..
 
COOLCAT88 said:
Well see, the weird thing is , my computer recognizes the drive. Whenever the Software comes up ( WdSmartWare), it prompts me to put in my password. I do that, but for some reason, it doesn't go through. I think it may be a bad sector or something else within the hard drive itself..
Click to expand...

Ok , so WdSmartWare uses some form of encryption for your data?
Have you installed any new software recently on your PC that could interfere in some way - anything?
Also, have you tried re-installing WdSmartWare to check whether it is just a matter of the software going awry?
If you still have no luck, check to see whether WdSmartWare is capable of recognising other drives (not just the one in question). If so, then it is still worth dismantling the drive and installing directly into your PC. You should still be able to decrypt if it does, and is certainly worth a shot if all else fails.
Sorry, I'm not familiar with that software or what type of security/encryption it uses to be able to suggest anything else.
 
I have drives die here and there, it happens, back things up to another drive for future. See if you can access files through Windows Explorer rather than use WD software. Maybe you could also update the WD software. Hope this helps.

Luv,
Sumemr
 
Well, i've uninstalled, and reinstalled the software, but same thing keeps happening. And no, I have not added any other software to my computer that would interfere with the software.

I took my drive and used it on my friend's computer, and just like before, didn't work. So i'm positive that it is something within the drive itself that is the problem..
 
My File servers hard drive went bad last month, but made sure i kept back ups going. I slapped in a new hard drive and 5 hrs later got everything back from the restore. Quarterly I do a full back up on a different hard drive just in case both my back up and my primary decides to take a crap at the same time. I also take the quarterly one with me when i go on vacation in case something happens to the house when I'm away.
 
COOLCAT88 said:
Well, i've uninstalled, and reinstalled the software, but same thing keeps happening. And no, I have not added any other software to my computer that would interfere with the software.

I took my drive and used it on my friend's computer, and just like before, didn't work. So i'm positive that it is something within the drive itself that is the problem..
Click to expand...

I have to admit it doesn't sound hopeful. Still might be worth extracting the drive itself to give that a go though.
Another possible option is to attempt a straight copy of all the data from the drive using a blind-write type of software that will ignore any encryption and just copy wholesale. Sometimes hard drives fail gradually, so it may be the case that it simply isn't up to the job of working with encrypted data, but may still be functional enough to transfer it. If you can get that data onto another drive you may have more luck with it.
Failing this, I'm out of suggestions I'm afraid.
 
You may also want to try some data recovery software. May be able to read something.

Luv,
Summer
 
Naughty Summer said:
You may also want to try some data recovery software. May be able to read something.

Luv,
Summer
Click to expand...

Any suggestions on good reliable software?

Anyway, I've bought a Seagate FreeAgent Go 1TB External Hard Drive. So far, it's working for me..
 
I use, EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard and Zero Assumption Recovery. They both work on external drives.

You should also check the WD forum and see what works for them also. They may have specific suggestions that are sometimes helpful

Luv,
Summer
 
GREAT SCOTT! I may have a solution..

I just remembered something. Before I got the WD drive, I used to save all my videos on a Iomega 320 GB drive ( Which I erased after they transferred over to the WD one). If I can use the file recovery programs already mentioned, This may be a good day..
 
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