I recently had a WD drive come in that was not functioning properly. It was determined that the WD circuit board had an electrical malfunction which left the main drive somewhat functional. That being said, the data seemed to be missing so I transfered the drive to external reader and ran a data recovery. The recovery resulted in (80) “archive.dat” files at about 4.29 GB each. I assume that this is the .dat archive file system of the original drive. What is the best way to go about reassembling the archive back to a useable file system? I have never seen this before.
Those files will likely be of no use to you.
Simply changing the boards on these newer drives (past 8 years) will not work.
