Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Computers & Peripherals => Topic started by: ChrisJR on March 02, 2009, 10:25:18 am
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Please excuse my language but I bought a WD My Book HDD just a month ago and the f**king thing has failed already, with all of my data on it!!! (I was in the process of transferring and backing up all my data to a couple hdd's).
What's the best way of recovering data? I contacted WDD and the w*nkers told me I have to pay for a data recovery service, even though I only bought it one month ago.
Are there are cheap or free software packages available online for recovering said data?
I'm massively pissed off about this and I really need help on this urgently.
Thanks
Chris
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Any idea how it failed? You could try peeling it out of its case and stuffing it into your PC. That way if it was an enclosure failure and not a drive failure you're golden.
There used to be a lot of data recovery programs out there. But they generally only repaired structure issues or fat finger (deleted the wrong directory) issues. Physical hardware issues are generally in the realm of the professional. And back when I worked at one of those places (nearly 20 years ago) we soaked you good. (Lets just say I wouldn't sound desperate when talking to one of those places.)
Something you obviously know but I'll mention for others. Nothing says your backup cannot fail. Once you're down to one copy you're in trouble.
Edit: Might be more appropriate to ask in the Digital Back forum where more pro's exist or at a place like Anandtech.
Edit2: If you pull it from the case make sure you're grounded.
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Any idea how it failed? You could try peeling it out of its case and stuffing it into your PC. That way if it was an enclosure failure and not a drive failure you're golden.
There used to be a lot of data recovery programs out there. But they generally only repaired structure issues or fat finger (deleted the wrong directory) issues. Physical hardware issues are generally in the realm of the professional. And back when I worked at one of those places (nearly 20 years ago) we soaked you good. (Lets just say I wouldn't sound desperate when talking to one of those places.)
Something you obviously know but I'll mention for others. Nothing says your backup cannot fail. Once you're down to one copy you're in trouble.
Edit: Might be more appropriate to ask in the Digital Back forum where more pro's exist or at a place like Anandtech.
Thanks for the reply.
When I run disk utility (I'm using a Mac btw), it comes up with the following...
(in a box) "First Aid failed
Disk Utility stopped verifying "My Book" because the following error was encountered:
The underlying task reported failure on exit."
Then it shows...
"Verifying volume "My Book"
** / dev/disk1s1
** Phase 1 - Read FAT
** Phase 2 - Check Cluster Chains
** Phase 3 - Checking Directories
Unable to read directory (input/output error)
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
1 non HFS volume check
Volume needs repair.
I just contacted a couple data recovery companies and they quoted extortionate amounts and out of principle I really don't want to be paying for data recovery one month after buying a HDD. My old Lacie's worked perfectly but this WDD is a chunk of sh*t.
Thanks.
Chris.
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Well...
It has been stated emphatically here for years -- NO single hard drive is going to be fail-safe and you *MUST* keep redundant copies if you want secure data storage. If you had done that, it would be a relatively trivial ordeal to exchange the defective unit for a replacement, and then copy the data over form your *REDUNDANT* copy...
Sorry if I sound like I don't care, but the fact is this is an old data point and *PROPER* back-up strategy would have avoided it entirely...
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Well...
It has been stated emphatically here for years -- NO single hard drive is going to be fail-safe and you *MUST* keep redundant copies if you want secure data storage. If you had done that, it would be a relatively trivial ordeal to exchange the defective unit for a replacement, and then copy the data over form your *REDUNDANT* copy...
Sorry if I sound like I don't care, but the fact is this is an old data point and *PROPER* back-up strategy would have avoided it entirely...
Of course I do keep copies but this drive failed when trying to backup a drive that was failing while my last drive had failed. It's amazing that all three of my HDDs failed virtually at the same time.
I'm now looking at buying two more HDDs to replace all of the failed ones (hopefully ones which will last longer than the WD) but also at online storage in a couple different places.
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Of course I do keep copies but this drive failed when trying to backup a drive that was failing while my last drive had failed. It's amazing that all three of my HDDs failed virtually at the same time.
I'm now looking at buying two more HDDs to replace all of the failed ones (hopefully ones which will last longer than the WD) but also at online storage in a couple different places.
Indeed... Frankly, relying on single external drives is iffy for the very reasons you face. You might want to consider an easy RAID-5 device such as the DROBO or other so as to avoid this type loss in the future.
Cheers,
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I like mozy.com.
Edit: My big dataloss involved 4 technologies failing at once. (One that I brought down intentionally. The others simply failed.)
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Indeed... Frankly, relying on single external drives is iffy for the very reasons you face. You might want to consider an easy RAID-5 device such as the DROBO or other so as to avoid this type loss in the future.
Cheers,
The DROBO's sound ideal and I may invest in one next month.
I like mozy.com.
Edit: My big dataloss involved 4 technologies failing at once. (One that I brought down intentionally. The others simply failed.)
Mozy looks superb, just the kind of thing I'm looking for. Thanks.
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DiscWarrior. Saved me on a few occasions.
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DiscWarrior. Saved me on a few occasions.
I've used DiscWarrior many times but it didn't work on this occasion. I'm using something called Data Rescue II now, very slow but seems to be working.
Thanks.
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Fingers crossed for you. Please let us know though.
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Data Rescue II has worked for me on several occasions when nothing else would work. Good luck to you.
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I've used DiscWarrior many times but it didn't work on this occasion. I'm using something called Data Rescue II now, very slow but seems to be working.
Thanks.
Chris don't assume it's the drive itself, it may well be the enclosure (power supply/bridge board). If you have no luck with a software solution I'd look to put the drive in a different enclosure.
Nick-T
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Fingers crossed for you. Please let us know though.
Thanks, will do
Data Rescue II has worked for me on several occasions when nothing else would work. Good luck to you.
Thanks, trying it now but may have to stall it for a few days as I've got a lot of work on over the next couple of weeks.
Chris don't assume it's the drive itself, it may well be the enclosure (power supply/bridge board). If you have no luck with a software solution I'd look to put the drive in a different enclosure.
Nick-T
It's quite possible it's hardware related. I'm going to recover the data first onto another HDD then look at either repairing the drive or more likely returning it.
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Mine died last week. My boot drive died, replaced it and was going to restore with the MYbook when it died...similar error msgs.
Steve
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Mine died last week. My boot drive died, replaced it and was going to restore with the MYbook when it died...similar error msgs.
Steve
I've had a bunch of WD mybooks fail. All drive types fail sometimes, mybooks seems to be particularly bad though.
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Please excuse my language but I bought a WD My Book HDD just a month ago and the f**king thing has failed already, with all of my data on it!!! (I was in the process of transferring and backing up all my data to a couple hdd's).
What's the best way of recovering data? I contacted WDD and the w*nkers told me I have to pay for a data recovery service, even though I only bought it one month ago.
Are there are cheap or free software packages available online for recovering said data?
I'm massively pissed off about this and I really need help on this urgently.
Thanks
Chris
nick-t mentioned moving the drive to a different enclosure...if it's not too difficult to open the My Book I'd try that...or into a tower...not sure if it's a 3.5" drive or not...but I've read where it's the hardware that can fail on these units and the drive itself is fine...
for my own back up I bought a Burly 5 bay enclosure...each bay has it's own fan and the entire unit has two bigger fans in back all in an effort to keep the drives cool...that's supposed to be important in keeping drives alive and well...I've just got mine as jbod and use carbon copy cloner to back up from one drive to another...I've also got one enclosure I bought from OWC, a mercury elite pro that's supposed to use the aluminum case itself to transfer heat, but I don't keep that running for too long...just back up files and shut it down...the Burly runs pretty much 24/7...
Chris...good luck getting your data recovered...
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nick-t mentioned moving the drive to a different enclosure...if it's not too difficult to open the My Book I'd try that...or into a tower...not sure if it's a 3.5" drive or not...but I've read where it's the hardware that can fail on these units and the drive itself is fine...
for my own back up I bought a Burly 5 bay enclosure...each bay has it's own fan and the entire unit has two bigger fans in back all in an effort to keep the drives cool...that's supposed to be important in keeping drives alive and well...I've just got mine as jbod and use carbon copy cloner to back up from one drive to another...I've also got one enclosure I bought from OWC, a mercury elite pro that's supposed to use the aluminum case itself to transfer heat, but I don't keep that running for too long...just back up files and shut it down...the Burly runs pretty much 24/7...
Chris...good luck getting your data recovered...
Thanks for the insight into what you use. Something like the Burly would be ideal. To have an enclosure with removable drives with individual fans sounds like the best long term solution. However, I need a system that I can use from various Mac computers, including desktop and laptops. What's the best but decent value solution?
I looked at the Drobo's and they seem pretty decent but are they good value? Also the OWC products look really nice. Are their products worth looking at
Thanks
Chris
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Thanks for the insight into what you use. Something like the Burly would be ideal. To have an enclosure with removable drives with individual fans sounds like the best long term solution. However, I need a system that I can use from various Mac computers, including desktop and laptops. What's the best but decent value solution?
I looked at the Drobo's and they seem pretty decent but are they good value? Also the OWC products look really nice. Are their products worth looking at
Thanks
Chris
I felt the Burly was right for my needs right now and the price for what you get seems good to me...I have it attached via the lycom express34 card to my macbook pro and it's been working great...if/when I get a new mac pro I can put a card in there that will work with the esata connection...I do think the Burly can be ordered as a firewire interface too, though I'm not sure...mine is esata...the owc enclosure I bought has multiple connections and I can boot from it via firewire...you can't boot from the esata enclosure...
for my set up right now it's just right...I can upgrade the drives as i need, have the backups on shelves to pop in and out as needed...it's a lot of storage for me and it's relatively easy...you gotta do the research yourself to see if this is right for your workflow...check out the burly site...and macgurus has a forum where you can ask any questions about the setups offered...here, here's a link...
http://www.macgurus.com/info/storehome.php (http://www.macgurus.com/info/storehome.php)
and i'm not affiliated with them in any way...just a happy customer...
M
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Just an update to my previous posts, I've now recovered the data from the damaged hard drive. I initially tried Data Rescue II but it was horrendously slow, took over 24 hours to scan the damaged drive, but also didn't find everything.
In the end I used Stellar Phoenix which is superb. It scanned the drive within seconds, found absolutely everything, and file recovery takes seconds per file.
Now everything has been copied / backed-up several times. Big lesson learnt!
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I've been looking at this: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/RAID/Desktop/ (http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/RAID/Desktop/)
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External 3.5 inch drives are junk. Not because the drives are, but because of the heat and the lack of ventilation. Unless it's a 5200rpm drive(WD GP or similar) and has a fan in it, it will fail fairly quickly. One solution is to run laptop drives. They generate low enough heat to work in an enclosure. Smaller, too.
The other and better solution for permanent storage is a SSD. SSDs only fail on writing and never on reading(aside from a massive physical problem), plus are stable for potentially decades. They aren't good at all for daily use, but for storage, they are without a doubt the best option on the market right now(too bad they aren't marketed as such, though)
For smaller amounts of data, a USB thumb drive also works, since it is the same technology.
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I have had several 500GB external drives fail, and all of them were able to continue working after I removed them from their enclosures and put them into new enclosures. In each case the electronics of the interface had failed.
My current problem is with a Seagate 500gb Barracuda internal hard drive that came with my Dell XPS 730 computer I bought in November, 2008. There had been no signs of drive failure (noises, messages, clicks, etc). One day last week I shut down the computer. When I turned everything on later that day, I got a message indicating there was no boot device. Going into the BIOS setup I saw that the computer was not recognizing the presence of the drive. Dell sent a replacement drive, but there was data on the original drive that was a victim to "good intentions to back it up this week." My bad, of course.
Ironically, I received a letter and CD in the mail from Dell that same day with a firmware/driver upgrade from Seagate, indicating that there was an "industry-wide" problem with that drive, and the upgrade would prevent the problem. Four days too late for me.
I tried putting the drive in an external enclosure, SATA-USB, but my other computer would not recognize it. It is now in the hands of the Geek Squad at Best Buy, on the advice of several friends who had good results with data recovery from them at a decent price.
Question: several people in this thread have mentioned rescue software, but how would that work if the computer cannot find the drive?
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Most of the time a drive has that sort of issue, it's the controller card that is dead/having issues. Usually you can swap the board from an identical drive and manage at least a data recovery. If you have a second drive like that, it might be worth trying. Note - it will not keep the bad sector data the same, so it's dangerous to use the thing other than to read the data off/recover it.