Corrupted HD Recovery

[Pegesus]

I had a WD MyBook. The drive became unresponsive a day or so ago. I would try to access the files on it and it would lock up my system. Occassionaly it would not even recognize the drive in Explorer. I figured I would remove the drive from its housing and connect it via SATA. I did this and upon boot up windows wanted to run a CHKDISK. I skipped this after the first attempt failed and my computer got hung up. Once I got into windows I tried to use a data recovery program however the drive wasn't visible.

It has been hit or miss with my computer finding this drive and now I am at the point where i cannot get the BIOS to recognize the drive and if it does it immediately goes to CHKDISK and hangs up the entire system.

Is there any way i will be able to recover the files off this drive or am I just S.O.L?

 

[Kyo]

Professional data recovery is pretty expensive. If you can no longer access the drive by conventional means, it means the drive requires serious lab equipment to find your data. I have a My Book also, and this makes me wish I could raid them.

 

[MN Scout]

An option might be to plug it back into the USB housing and then plug it in after windows starts and run a program like Get Data Back or PC-Inspector File Recovery(free) and see if they see them. Hopefully the programs will work before your system freezes.

 

[Pegesus]

tried the above idea...unfortunetaley as soon as the drive is plugged in and it is opened it freezes.

Looks like I am going to be out of luck since I'm not going to take it to a professional data recovery service.

If anyone else has any miracles out there please let me know. Otherwise thanks for trying and be warned these things end up overheating over time it seems.

 

[Deleted member 88227]

It's a long shot, but it's probably just the circuit board that's messed up. If you can find an IDENTICAL hard drive with a working circuit board, you can swap them. Though the drives have to be IDENTICAL, almost all the numbers on both hard drives must match, just one variation on the firmware and they wont be interchangeable. Which is why this is such a long shot.

Another thing you could probably try doing is putting the drive in the freezer for a little while, wrapping it with some paper towels and placing it in a zip lock bag to keep the moisture out. Taking it out the freezer and immediately try to access the drive. This has worked at least once for me, though it ended up taking a couple cycles to pull all the data off the 40Gb hard drive I did this to. Luckily I had a how swappable bay on my computer.