and I have a WD caviat green 2TB that crashed. I am trying to recover the data. It is a USB external and I have it in a cage.
The drive seems to spin ok and when I plug it into openSuse and run partitioner it tells me that there are no partitions.
From some reading it seems that WD does some proprietary stuff to their drives (grrrrrr), and I am trying to get around that.
I have tried 2 different recovery apps for Windows, Wondershare and ICare Data recovery but no love so far.
Has anyone done something like this via openSuse ? I trust openSuse more than Windows and would like to find an app to help me.
I had a newish dying WD drive and I can tell you nothing I tried brought it to live, as far as I remember the WD restore software was windows or DOS based, and the DOS version was much better, but I’m not sure about an external usb drive as DOS only has USB 1.1 support and that’s slow as a snail it would take days if not weeks to run the tests or do a recovery, you could try spinrite or something similar that remagnetisies disks but that rarely works, I’ve had mixed expirience with hddregenerator on windows I was able to get the data back and the disk was working for a few more weeks but then it died again. if there is no important data on that drive I’d say get a new one as commercial data recovery software (spinrite and hddregenerator) cost about as much as a new disk, there are a few opensource apps but most are DOS based and as I said it would take forever running a USB 1.1 disk under DOS but if you have the time to spare try Victoria for DOS it’s freeware http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/victoria_for_dos.html
you’d need to provide your own bootable DOS disk (it can be a usb drive) just copy VCR352.COM and VCR.INI to your DOS disk and after boot run it, you also need to find a DOS distribution that has USB drivers if I remember correctly Microsoft’s Win98 boot disk had usb and cd drivers but unless you have win98 that one is even more difficult to find, FreeDOS or OpenDOS probably have CD/USB drivers but I have no experience with them
On Sun, 17 Jan 2016 16:56:02 +0000, gogalthorp wrote:
> Testdisk is a good Linux based data recovery program
>
>
> Also maybe run smartctl for diagnostics
Yes, smartctl is a good way to learn what might be wrong.
If the drive isn’t completely gone, I’d be inclined to try dd_rescue to
take an image of the drive and work from the image. If it’s suffering
some sort of mechanical failure, though, that could take a fair amount of
time - and could accelerate the hardware failure (I had a drive that did
this not long ago, actually - it was a total loss…)
If it’s spinning OK(You can feel normal vibration and it’s not making ghastly noises), then maybe the MBR just need to be reset? Point the following to your target disk…
fdisk /mbr
Only after that, <then> check to see if your partitions and data exist.
If data exists but not partitions, I don’t remember what app I used years ago to restore the partitions… was it testdisk(Yes, if the partitions are damaged, you can repair the partitions and presto! - The data is accessible again)? In any case, you need to be <very> careful to avoid damaging any data. In fact, as Jim sugggest if the data is <very> valuable, you may want to buy another drive and image your old disk to the new drive so that you have a working and an original copy.
Although I haven’t needed to recover a WD disk, typically anything proprietary shouldn’t be that different than other disks… All disks have to present fairly standardized objects to the software running.
AFAIK the main “issue” might be “Advanced Format” block sizes which used to be specific to WD but is now widely utilized by practically all disk manufacturers… In that case sometimes a smaller, more traditional block size might be virtually overlaid but unless your recovery process goes <very> low you won’t encounter this. And, you shouldn’t run into issues relating to data recovery until you first make sure you’ve repaired the way the disk is read first (ie MBR, partitions).
smartctl 6.3 2014-07-26 r3976 [x86_64-linux-3.16.7-29-desktop] (SUSE RPM)
Copyright (C) 2002-14, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Western Digital Caviar Green (AF)
Device Model: WDC WD20EACS-11BHUB0
Serial Number: WD-WCAZA4788882
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2059407df
Firmware Version: 51.0AB51
User Capacity: 2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: ATA8-ACS (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is: SATA 2.6, 3.0 Gb/s
Local Time is: Mon Jan 18 12:45:20 2016 CST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 7533 864114312
# 2 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 7203 864087720
# 3 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 7036 864106211
# 4 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 6892 864106208
# 5 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 6845 864106232
# 6 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 6773 864106232
# 7 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 6768 864106233
# 8 Short offline Completed without error 00% 6696 -
# 9 Short offline Completed without error 00% 6528 -
#10 Short offline Completed without error 00% 6115 -
#11 Short offline Completed without error 00% 5771 -
#12 Short offline Completed without error 00% 5542 -
#13 Short offline Completed without error 00% 5277 -
#14 Short offline Completed without error 00% 5255 -
#15 Short offline Completed without error 00% 5159 -
#16 Short offline Completed without error 00% 5152 -
#17 Short offline Completed without error 00% 5124 -
#18 Short offline Completed without error 00% 5088 -
#19 Short offline Completed without error 00% 5048 -
SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
1 0 0 Not_testing
2 0 0 Not_testing
3 0 0 Not_testing
4 0 0 Not_testing
5 0 0 Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.
and the I started running Testdisk and this is what it shows so far.
Actually, this is not my disk, It belongs to a friend that uses it to store a ton of pictures. I am not sure of what happened to it so as to prompt him to try a recovery. He first took it to a recovery service and they said $450.00.
So, he asked me if I could help. I really need to know the history before I try anything to repair.
I think he might have plugged it into a new Windows 10 box and it came up blank.
Oddly he said that when he was in the recovery store he could see the pictures, however when he brought it back to his house, he could not.
It had 2 circuit boards in the case and I dont know what the 2nd one is for. Maybe something to do with the WD encryption. The cable that came with it has an odd connector on one end (SATA ?), USB on the other.
And then I read this about another user of this drive and it does not look encouraging.
The WD My Book Essential is an encrypted HDD and will only be readable in its original enclosure.
I just got off the phone with the user and this is the history.
The drive was working under Win 10 but then started to fail. By fail he said that he could see the files but could not copy them.
It was at this point that he took it to a recovery shop and now the drive does not show up undre Win 10.
Well thing look bad. But testdisk should be able to read data from it maybe. Note that the more you run a failing disk the less change to recover. If me I’d use clonezilla or dd or ddrescue to copy an image before it is all gone then try to piece things together with testdisk from the image made.
First, I assume you haven’t removed the disk from its enclosure. Yes, maybe there is some propretary encryption which requires the enclosure so take the warning at its word.
If this is a generic external device (WD MyBook) which is accessible under Windows,
Image the disk so that you have a working and an original copy. The things you will do to try to recover could further damage any chances to recover the files. The copied image should be fine to work with (virtual or on a real physical disk) without whatever proprietary encryption WD might have used in the enclosure, again showing the weakness of disk encryption not protecting data that’s not at rest.
I assume the MyBook can be mounted, you just can’t see the contents. Connect to your Windows system (since that was the last working OS) and run chkdisk, first from Win10 File Explorer (drive properties). If that doesn’t fix, then try running chkdisk from the command line with the repair option (it’s supposed to do a better job than however the GUI tool works).
If the above doesn’t work, then try running any of the other rescue utilities. If you have the image mounted as a virtual disk (eg in virtualization) this shouldn’t be too difficult and you can try many things running different OS and tools.
FYI -
I’ve had very good success several times recovering data from various disks (primarily undeleting files which have been “permanently” deleted) although not in a disk failure situation using photorec.
At the very least, you can point it at a target and get some idea what might be recoverable. It’s non-invasive so by itself it won’t destroy data.
On Sun, 17 Jan 2016 16:56:02 +0000, gogalthorp wrote:
> Testdisk is a good Linux based data recovery program
>
>
> Also maybe run smartctl for diagnostics
Yes, smartctl is a good way to learn what might be wrong.
If the drive isn’t completely gone, I’d be inclined to try dd_rescue to
take an image of the drive and work from the image. If it’s suffering
some sort of mechanical failure, though, that could take a fair amount of
time - and could accelerate the hardware failure (I had a drive that did
this not long ago, actually - it was a total loss…)