I have a 3tb mybook essential…it worked great for about 6 months (was a backup for all my photos) im a professional photographer.
Now the drive isnt showing up on any of my comps except in disk management as 2 seperate unallocated partitions
see picture below: i can not do anything with the smaller partition and it says they are MBR, shouldnt they be gtp?
Im using an hp G7 series laptop and had no problems for over 6 months. I did recently connect the drive to a WD TV LIVE PLUS and it seemed to stop working after that. could that have changed the drive format?
What can i do to recover my photos??? please help!
It probably is corrupt. Maybe TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk will restore it. You might also try accessing by booting from a Linux Live CD. EaseUS has one http://www.ptdd.com/ Recuva is free http://www.piriform.com/recuva data recovery. There are other data recovery programs that are try and buy that let you recover a small amount to see if it work for you.
I have the same exact drive and I’m sorry to say but I don’t believe anything you try will repair it. I spent weeks trying to figure out the problem. Read other posts of people with the same issue and tried everything that was suggested until finally I gave up and paid $100 to get a diagnosis. I took it to Geek Squad tech support so they could open the drive to see if they could retrieve my data and I was told that they couldn’t and that the hard drive could not be repaired. They offered to send it to another location for a deeper diagnosis and repair attempt but that would cost me anywhere between $500 to up to almost $2000. I am so disappointed in Western Digital products because this is the 3rd hard drive that goes to **bleep**. Their support is also terrible. All they do is direct you to some data recovery companies where you will need to spend 100s of dollars to try to retrieve data that you can never get back if the data retrieval is not successful. ( I wonder if WD and these Data Retrieval companies they refer you to have some kind of agreement to split the money they make off of people with this type of issue. WD probably purposely sends thousands of faulty products out in the market so they can make more money). Western Digital should stand by their [Deleted] product and at least offer to retrieve the data at no cost to us while the item is still under Warranty. Mine failed too after less than a year and I am both angry and sad because I’ve lost thousands of family pictures and videos that can never be replaced. There are thousands of posts by people with the same issue, not to mention probably thousands of others by people that have not posted. I think Western Digital should realize that a lot of these MyBook Essential 3TB hard drives are faulty and they should do something to rectify the issue. I’m sorry to say but unless you’re willing to spend a couple thousand dollars for a possible 85% success data retrieval attempt, you can pretty much say that you’ve lost all of that information. This upsets me so much that I decided to create a login just so that I could post my comments about how I feel about this product because I see that so many people have had the same issue. I mean you buy these products to back up your data to prevent loss and then the worst happens, the back up device fails and there goes all your information. My hard drive was almost full and if you’re like me I have no choice but to pay the $2-K dollars to retrieve my data because I’m not willing to lose all of my pictures and videos. [Deleted] I want nothing more than to successfully get all of my pictures back without having to pay. I will never buy a Western Digital product again and I will make sure that any computer I buy in the future does not use an internal Western Digital product. My advice to everyone is to do the same. There are other well known hard drive manufacturers out there so be safe and if you have too just replace your WD hard drive for another brand.
I too have a problem with my WD 3 TB my book essential. It is just over 1 year old, out of a service plan and my computer does not recognize it. A computer repair company in town has said the drive is “corrupt”. I am curious if the program you wrote about actually worked for you, since after reading the comments about this product, it sounds like the trial product identifies files, but then they are actually not readable or retrievable when you pay for the product and the service is not good. Can you give an update please?
that doesnt look good! all i did is run the trial version so far… i will try a few other partition recovery programs i have full versions of when i get home…it definetly found each and every file, named them what they were originally and lets me view and save them with watermarks all over them.
