2TB WD Elements Desktop stopped working - please help

Hi all,

so, about 25 minutes ago I the drive dropped from approximately a foot’s height, while editing video directly from the drive itself. The USB obviously came out of it’s case’s socket slightly and the video playback fritted to a halt.

Probably the worse way a hard drive can fail.

The drive has power and on boot up of the machine it goes through all the motions. It spins up, and a few seconds later it spins back down again. The light on the side flashes on and off continuously and that’s it. 

It “installed drivers” once, but It doesn’t come up in disk management.

I seroisly doubt the disk itself can be damaged, so my guess is that the flimsy WD controller in the case (which prevents me from treating it like a normal HD) must have gone wrong. Would data retrieval companies be able to 

save the day?

This is panic time.

Does anyone have any words of wisdom aside from “back your stuff up”?

thanks 

Marco

I was transferring a bulk of data - Left, when I came back, the transfer had failed and the drive was clicking. Since the drive was brand new I regged it and sent it back RMA.

If you are still in Warranty - Just send it back. Is it clicking now, or buzzing? If it is still in warranty, just fill out an RMA, you must register the product first, and I take it you have done this already? Just say “Drive Clicks” and send it back, don’t offer any other information.

But in the future, these drives are intended to stay PUT- In one place. These are not made for transferring data from different locations, they are made for your personal backup, to be in your Library, hence the “:book” shape.

If you want to go from place to place moving Data for the editing you do, you must get one of the smaller USB drives, notebook sized, those are durable and can handle a drop from a height, I’ve dropped several of those, while in progress of moving data and none of them have ever failed.

But yours, if it is in warranty, send it back get a new one, but say Bye to your data. I just lost 1.4 TB of irrecoverable and non replaceable legacy programs.

PS: I feel your pain though, join the club! This has happened to me about 10 times in the last 25 years. I keep copies of stuff in several locations now. 

Won’t recovery companies be able to help?

Sure if you have 1,000 dollars to burn. That is the most inexpensive service I could find, too.

I’ just had the same thing happen to me, I lost about 500 GB of very hard to find older versions of Programs - ISO images I’ve saved over a 15 year period, I had JUST backed them up. Many of them customised by me, for personal uses. Some of these, I’ve lost for good, but I have most of it backed up- I’ve got roughly 6 TB of assorted storage spread across my network on 3 Desktops and one laptop.

A recovery specialist, remember they have to operate in a clean room, they have to disassemble the drive and pull the data off. Most of the time you will lose your Index files so the recovered files will be in numbered folders, so if you have Media files that are part of a project, they will no longer be stored in the same folders. They use a program much like “Recuva” by Piriform, but unlike Recuva, it cannot be set to move the data back to where it was. So they move all of your data to a new drive, which you have to pay for, and it’s up to you to search it and move everything back into the proper folders.

But if you think the Drive may be OK and it is just the controller - Think again, cos the Drive has no impact protection in these boxes at all. Hook the drive back up, and see if it finds the hardware. If it does, go in to Device Manager, pull up the drive, and hit “Populate Volume” and it will tell you “Cannot pull volume information”

Because this is exactly what happened to me. But the easiest way to do it, plug the drive in and stick it up to your ear, and if there is any clicking at all, it’s bad.

it spins down because heads failed. Recovery companies can recover data from these instances. However, it is not cheap. If your drive spun down how do you expect it to come up in disk manager or give you any data off of it? Head replacement is all I can say

Well if that is all it is, they can most possibly stick the plater in another hard drive case and use the head from that, then they can just use Teracopy or other fast data transfer program to move it all. 4 hours tops.

But they still have to crack open your physical drive - And that is not cheap. They wear hazmat suits in a clean room like Scully in The X Files or Walter in Fringe!

not really the way it’s done. :slight_smile: