I have an external 2Tb backup drive at home from WD Elements, and after my Win7-PC froze during copying to this drive, I unplugged the drive and replugged it. It never showed up on the desktop and when entering Disk Management it would find the drive, but tell me that is must be initialized. I pressed OK to initialize and the following message pops up: ‘The media is write protected’. I’ve been searching for hours for a solution, and here’s what I’ve tried:
- Shut down Windows 7, power off complete system, turn back on - no effect
- Uninstall driver, reboot, automatic reinstall driver - no effect
- Changed USB cables, Power cables - no effect
- Connect to different Windows 7 system - does not find drive
- Connect to Ubuntu 12.04 system - does not find drive
- Check Windows 7 registry for storage device protocols - nothing wrong
- Open casing, replace USB/SATA interface with similar interface from other WD HD - no effect
- Replaced PCB with similar PCB from other WD HD - nothing happened (switched back)
- Ran WinDlg QuickTest: Status code = 06 (failed servo and/or seek test element) failure
- Ran WinDlg ExtendedTest: Too many bad sectors
- Running TestDisk 6.14 data recovery utilities (may 2013) - still running as we speak, but not hopefull
When I listen to the drive, it sounds like it’s constantly cycling. A very faint ticking, but not as loud as the click of death. Do you have any solutions? This was used as the main backup, but I have off-site backups from about 5 months ago. Nevertheless, I would like to recover this, otherwise it’s still 5 months of personal items lost.
Thanks for any help you can give me!
