Help! I attempted to retrieve a backup from my 1 TB My Book yesterday, and was informed by both my backup program (Macrium) and Windows Explorer (in 7 Home Premium) that the drive needed to be formatted. I tried it on another machine with essentially the same result. As it stands now I cannot access any of my backed up data, which has me extremely nervous. Can anyone suggest what might have happened and/or what I can do about it?
Hi, sorry to hear you cannot access your files, have you tried some troubleshooting steps like connecting the My Book power cable directly to the wall or connecting the USB cable to the back of the PC? If the problem continues, it would appear to be a data corruption problem, with the help of a data recovery program you should be able to recover your files. With Google you can find several options online.
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Thanks, Ichigo! We think alike: I bought a data recovery program (EaseUS) today, as a matter of fact. I figured it was a good thing to have anyway. It claimed to find all manner of stuff, but even it says the My Book is not formatted. I guess I had better read the instructions thoroughly before messing around and possibly making matters worse.
There are other free data recovery programs you can try, check the link below.
http://community.wd.com/t5/External-Drives-for-PC/My-Book-Home-Edition-500-GB/m-p/655183#M19779
If that doesn’t work and data recovery is a must, you can also contact any of the data recovery partners on the WD Support page. Some of them offer a free evaluation of your drive.
You aren’t going to believe this! DOS to the rescue. I started looking into the possibility of formatting the apparently corrupted drive. One suggestion that I found was to run CHKDSK on it. It was like a light bulb lit up. So I ran it, it found stuff to fix, and the drive is readable again. I’m running my usual array of virus/malware scans on the PC itself, after which I’ll try backing up to and restoring from it. But it’s looking good right now!
Awesome, good to hear. :wink:
