Need to recover data from a WD My Book Pro Edition (1TB)

[DiegoBuzz]

Hi,
 I’m having troubles trying to recover data from a WD My Book 1 TB Pro Edition ( http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=103&lang=en))

This is the full story:
 - I bought this HD 3 years ago, and have been using it without problems… but last week it turned off and never started again.

 - After several tries, I decided to remove the HD from the case, and try to acces the drive directly.

 - So, I bought a USB to SATA cable. One like this: http://www.asia.ru/images/target/photo/50922846/USB_to_IDE___SATA_Cable.jpg.

 - With that cable, I can hear the Drive starting and working :)… so it seems to be alive.

 - When I connect it to my Windows 7 laptop through the USB port, Windows see it (I can see it through the connected USB devices), but windows is not assgining a letter to it.

 - I have been googling about this, and tried diferent things, but no one worked:
   - I connected it to a Win XP and saw the same result
   - I see the disk through Disk MAnagement (diskmgmt.msc) but can’t assign a letter. Also, I can see that it has 4 different partitions (this is new to me…I thought that the disk had only one partition)

 - Im thinking about File System… so downloaded an Ubuntu VM, run this using
VMWare, but the USB does not appear on /image/ (Im not sure if I can do something to force to mount the unit… and see if I can get the data from a Linux environment)…

 - In some places says that WD encrypts the data by hardware (that I’m not using right now). I expect to not be the case
 - Now, I’m not sure what should I do…I need to recover some data from there!!

 Anyone has a sugestion?

Thanks in advance

[Kieren]

Hi,

Check out a bootable rescue CD. This one boots into Linux and includes a number of useful utilities for recovery.

http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage

Hiren’s Boot CD is a favorite of mine. It gives a choice of mini-XP, DOS, or Linux boots. I suggest going for Linux in its default Gparted mode.

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

Either of these will give you many options for viewing and copying your data. Be prepared with something you can copy the data to.

EDIT: I am a little puzzled by the multiple partitions, which might suggest Linux file system. However, what I’ve been able to dig up on the drive family suggests that they are formatted with FAT32. The rescue CD’s should load USB drivers, and Gparted should tell you what is really on the drive.

[DiegoBuzz]

Hi!

Thanks for your detailed answer.

I didnt follow it completelly, but it gave me some new ideas to resolve this!

This is all the steps that I have done during last days:

 - I removed the HDD from the My Book Case

 - Bought a USB to SATA cable

 - Dowload VMPlayer

 - Looked for a Linux image (I downloaded Satani Ubuntu…dont ask why)

 - Started the image

 - I opened a Linux Console

 - Run this command: fdisk -l    

   This helped me to see all the partitions of the HDD. I saw that mine was /dev/sdb4 (Was one partition with almost 95% of the drive assigned)

 - With that information, and knowing that this was an EXT3 filesystem (not ntfs, as I thought at the beginnng), I wrote this command:

    sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb4 /media

and …worked!

I was able to see all my data…

and started to download this to Google Docs as a backup of the backup

thanks again for your help!

[Kieren]

Excellent! Good work!

So it was Linux partitioned…hmm. One more thing to keep in mind. Thanks for the info.

[eugenetan727]

You may use WD hard drive data recovery tool, see this guide:

Recover data from WD hard drive

Hope this helps.