Retrieve files from My Book Live

WD Legacy Products My Book Live
1

Hi,

I’m not sure what topic would be most appropriate for the issue i have. But my My Book Live 2TB did not work anymore, so i have removed the disk from the NAS housing and added it to a disk enclosure i have.

I can mount the disk in Windows and see the contents via DiskInternals file recovery tool and even with R-linux, but i can’t find the files that should be on it.

Can someone please help me in the right direction or tell me what tool to use to retrieve my files?

Many thanks, Tom

2

I moved your post to the correct board.

You most likely had some corruption wipe the partition on the drive. You could try data recovery software that restores partitions to see if you can get you data back. Otherwise, you will most likely have to send it in to a data recovery company to get your data back.

I might add that if the data is corrupted, you won’t get it back.

3

Thanks for your reply and the move Bill.

Well I can ‘see’ the partition and see all kinds of contents of the drive; all Linux. I just wish there was a bit more documentation about this. Use tool X for the recovery and check path YZ for your files where Linux stores your files.

4

By the way, I am now doing a restore with Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery (RAW recovery) and it has found thousands of files; many Gigabytes. So probably the files are not lost, however I guess that when I actually restore them it will be restored without any original folder structure… :frowning:

Does anybody have an idea how to retrieve that also?

Thanks!

5

I know nothing about this product, but if it is, in fact, recovering raw data then some of the things recovered (if recoverable) should be the directories. If that is not the case, and you have recovered to a separate drive and not overwritten the original drive, I recommend getting LSoft Technologies’ Active File Recovery. The free version is quite limited, but the professional version is not too expensive, and does a good job of recovering.

I had recent experience with a few recovery products. At least one did not recovery directories. Since I had hundreds of subdirectories and something like 45,000 files, a flat recovery of just files was worthless. Luckily, I was recovering to a different disk so I had lost nothing and was able to try other products. LSoft Technologies’ Active File Recovery did a good job of recovering the old directory structure. Several large (and important) files had been corrupted by the time I did the recovery, but that can’t be blamed on the tool.

6

Wow thanks pokeefe! I didn’t notice your reply until now. I will try that LSoft app asap.

7

I am trying LSoft Active File Recovery as we speak and it does great things, although for many files there is no directory structure information present, and what isn’t there…

The app is easy to use and it it is also very thorough (Supersearch).

I even bought the standard license for it. So thanks again for the tip!