2TB WD Elements Inaccessible

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Hi community,

I have read and followed the FAQ at the top of the site. The following is just some extra information about my situation to see if anyone has anything.

I have a 2TB WD Elements drive that has become inaccessible. There was no physical damage or movement of the device before the effor occured

When plugged in and connected to a computer the HDD is detected and installs the WD drivers. First the drive loaded and was extremely slow, now it just appears as Local Disk F and is inaccessible. Attempting to access it crashes explorer. The HDD is emitting no unusual sounds and appears to be spinning normally. The indicator light is flashing. It can’t be mounted through diskmgmnt but does sometimes appear as a drive with unallocated space.

Viewing the HDD with Hard Disk Sentinel detected the drive correctly and showed it on 74% health but could not run any tests on the drive. I have also tried with a different USB cable and accessing it on other computers with the same results.

Is there anything else that I could try in order to recover the data on this drive?

2

Hello and welcome to the WD Community.

Have you tried using a data recovery software to see if the software can see the data?

3

Hi ERmorel,

I’ve just tried using some data recovery software and I can see the drive but when attempting to scan the data I am receiving an error “Read Error at LBA 0 (Sector 1)”. The program is recommending I clone the drive first before proceeding.

WD Support have reached out to me via email so I will talk with them first, and failing that I will try to get hold of a drive I can clone to and explore the recovery software.