Thanks.
This wasn’t supposed to be a ‘back up’ drive, just a portable that I brought with when using my laptop. I didn’t have time to get data off before it totally failed (within an hour after I repaired the drive after the first unexpected disconnect).
I spoke with the tech support for the recovery software I tried (R-Studio for Mac); they say that the results I got indicate that the drive was not transmitting any data to the software, as all of the sectors from 0 to 2047 (when I aborted the image creation) reported as ‘bad’ – the software couldn’t read them after two tries.
This drive is a little over two years old – I have other portables that I have used for over 5 years without any problems, but those were laptop drives that I put into external enclosures myself, so I wasn’t expecting to have problems with this drive so soon.
I have learned my lesson and won’t buy another WD drive. Now I have to figure out how to get the data out of the drive when I can’t simply put it into a different case.
